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Nick was conveniently stashed in a hotel while Knightlight worked his magic with his DMV contact, Tallulah was stashed with Nick, and well--okay, so Knightlight wasn’t actually working on the DMV contact, he was with her. “I brought a helmet this time,” she said, tossing it to him as he joined her at the sidewalk. It was a reference to her taking Tallulah to a hotel without one--it didn’t occur to him that he wouldn’t have any idea what she was talking about. She turned her attention to her motorcycle, the sweet silver and black machine she’d bought the day she graduated from basic. Or, okay, she bought it the first Saturday of grad weekend, but it was the first day she was allowed off base in eight and a half weeks. That counted as graduation day. Sort of. “Unfortunately, I can’t drive a car, so you’re still in the b***h seat.”

She smiled at Finn, sharp and unsettling. “So, want to go see the apartment building I picked out? Like, Megiddo wrote you the options, yeah?”

“You are so lucky Tallulah seems to be personally invested in your hands remaining unbroken,” said Kaatje, in a tone that might be intended to be threatening and might just be friendly. She started the bike--the only thing that made her sad about her motorcycle was that it was new, like, 2012 levels of new, so it started with a key. ‘It’s more convenient,’ the salesman had said ingratiatingly. Kaatje wanted to say, Who cared about convenience? It was about image, obviously, or she’d have a little Smart car. <********> “You call me Mister again and I will do you a damage, Knightlight.”

They took off at a leisurely pace, weaving between traffic like Kaatje did it every day--and, like, she did, so no wonder. Kaatje and her cargo zipped right through the DCU area, the downtown area, until they hit Historic Destiny City, which really ought to have a completely different name in Kaat’s opinion. The one no one had asked for, right? “It isn’t too close to DCU, which I suppose could be a boner killer,” she said, killing the power and letting the motorcycle glide to a stop. She popped the kickstand and took her key, tucked her helmet under an arm. “You know why not? Lots of Negaverse activity there. Lots of Avalon near there. I don’t want to presume on the topic of Wolframite, but I’m presuming he’s just as crazy as he’s always been, and that, like crazy, he can be found where-ever he’s most inconvenient.”

Hadn’t he had a civilian fling once? Now, of course, he was probably banging a Negaverser. She suppressed a brief guilty shudder at the image that flashed past her mind’s eye. People will tell you anything to make the fire stop burning, but… you know… it’s fire. Even Gunn couldn’t strip something so elemental of its base nature. “Anyway, here we are,” she said, stopping at the end of a short walk. “Casa de purification, or whatever. I don’t speak Spanish, I speak Dutch.”

If she chewed gum anymore, this was where she would have popped it. Or lit a cigarette, or something. “Seven units,” she said, “not counting the one I called dibs on, the one I am assuming you will want, and the one we are probably giving to Nick. I figure he’s a mature adult and I can stick him in a ground floor room--where is the god damn realtor, I swear to ********.”

Kaatje supposed nobody else would really hate Wolframite like she did. The one-eyed Captain (perhaps he was a General now) was a reminder of her weakest time, of her worst time, when she’d done things that she’d known were wrong and done them anyway--for vengeance, for a reminder. She wanted to see him as much as she wanted to kill him, with the sort of passion that burned so fierce she sometimes couldn’t tell if she loved him or hated him: loved him for what he showed about her. Hated him for it, too. Something like that. It was confusing.

“Yeah, ten,” she said, “and I don’t know. Right now my prospective residents are you, me, and Nick. I think Kairatos already has a place. So, like, whenever you get a moment, yeah? Let me know.”

She waved to the realtor, who chivvied them inside and handed off some papers to Kaatje. Kaatje looked them over dispassionately before folding them in half and tucking them in her back pocket. “I’m going to show my business partner here around before I sign anything,” she told the realtor, who tried to protest, so Kaatje said, “Hey. It will take thirty minutes. I assure you, signing these will take me less than ten.”

Finn and Kaat wandered into the first apartment off to the left, and Kaatje leaned on the counter in the small kitchenette. “So, depending on whether Nick and Tallulah decide to continue ********, I might put them in here,” she said. “Iron staircase goes up to a lofted bedroom. There’s a spare room, but, like, I figure they can always host someone, right? Stove works. I tried all the stoves in the apartments, actually. And… the fridge runs. That’s only supposedly true, they let the place defrost.”

The floor was scuffed, but. “I figure we refinish the floors, paint the walls, maybe put up crown molding to hide weird paint marks. Electrical’s up to date but I want to update all the bathrooms. This place is so cheap I can afford to do that, you know?”

Kaatje nodded, and then she shrugged. “I don’t care. I could refit this entire place twice and it would just mean that I would have to skip taking my two weeks of leave in Cabo this year.” Not that she’d ever gone to Cabo. The French Riviera was more her speed. “I mean, it’d pinch, but it’s not like I don’t have a separate account for living expenses.” She shrugged again, because hey, she was rich. And she’d only get richer as time went by, because--well, when your trust fund was stock in your parents’ company and the whole thing was just going up and up and up, things went like that.

“My family will be thrilled that I’m taking an interest in something other than airplane fuselages,” she said to herself. Admitting she had something so pedestrian as a family seemed weird, at least in front of a guy she’d heaved into the air by his coat collar. Kaatje preferred to pretend she had sprung full-formed from the head of Zeus. (She was comparing herself to Athena completely unironically, which was sort of sad, but she decided to ignore that too.) “Anyway, I was thinking middle-of-the-line. Like, this area’s already nice, but I don’t want to have to drive rent up--actually, I had some thoughts for how to make that easier for those that can’t just get access to their past selves’ bank accounts.”

On the top floor, she opened the door to the apartment she wanted. “This one’s mine, by the way,” she said. It was sort of easy to see why; the arrangement of the space gave her--well, the exact same amount of space as anyone else, just arranged better. “I was thinking we could just trade living space for labor, once we have a few apartments fixed up. If Belzy really does get his doctoral degree or what the ********, we still have the summer to make him help put up crown molding and s**t. And from my understanding, little things are always going wrong in buildings, so we could just make it known to people that they’re responsible for helping fix up any apartments that still have issues--in exchange for their rent being waived.”

In case that didn’t make sense, she simplified it down: “Like a halfway house. The goal is to get them secure enough that they feel alright with moving out on their own, but, like, while they’re here we can teach them useful skills. HVAC personnel make a s**t ton of money.”

It was kind of adorable how Belzy had continued to b***h (good-naturedly, but it was still bitching) about his confusion with the outfits. Gunn had come up with some pretty innovative uses for senshi uniform standards in her time, but she had to admit that his ribbon would be much less easy to strip off and strangle someone with. She’d never tried garroting someone with her new Eternal ribbons, but it suddenly seemed very much like a thing she should do.

“I don’t care about original woodwork,” she said. “It’s convenient to the subway and police wander through all the time. There’s a grocery store seven tenths of a mile that way. It’s got laundry in the basement. I already checked that, and I’m going to replace the machines because they suck and I also don’t care about getting profit from them. And this way, people can room with others who make them feel secure. There’s a meeting space in the basement, too, so we can do things there to foster general Order-side ‘brotherhood’.” Facetious air quotes. “That’s the most important thing to fostering a feeling of unity, Knightlight. Security and trust.”

She brushed off her hands. “And, you know, a united antagonist, but that has done jack s**t for the White Moon, you know?” It really should’ve started to force at least a sense of unity, but… she supposed being able to basically ignore the problem whereas an MTI was a constant threat…

Senshi were stupid.

“Anyway, like I said. It’s not a hardship. Service before self and excellence in all I do.” She hooked red hair behind one ear and started signing papers. “So, you should take a look around the building. Let me know what you want for your place.”

She shrugged, embarrassed. “They might be turncoat traitors but they’re my wingmen once they finish it and get all fancy and white-suited,” she mumbled, crossing her arms over her chest. He might’ve been making a joke but even then, it wasn’t generosity, it was practicality. It was doing what she had to do to bring up forces for Order. And, like, she was doing it because she was loaded, and she hadn’t seen any of her similarly settled Order acquaintances in a while. Fallon was… gone... and Scylla was gone and Birhan Isat was gone. So, like, that left her.

Only her.

Kaatje rubbed her temples. “Good idea,” she said, “So, like, the southeast unit’s laid out similarly to this one. You’d be easy access from the stairs. Strategically speaking, that’s the best space for you to occupy, since both doors are like, less than… I’m gonna say fifteen? Feet away. It sounds far but it’s not.

“So, you have that friend in the DMV, yeah?” It seemed relevant to nail that out here, where she was fairly sure no Negaverse officers or DMC whores were listening. She pulled out the realtor’s papers and started to sign next to each tiny neon post-it in official-looking black ballpoint, leaning hard on the counter. “Can they be counted on to keep this secret?”

Kaatje nodded, and signed on the last dotted line. “Let’s go back downstairs and give this to everyone’s favorite piece of s**t realtor, then.” There wasn’t anything else to say. Finn knew the stakes.