Figures out Sophia's secret identity

“Are you saying that there's anything for me to rat about?” I asked. “I mean, you're the golden girl on the track team. There shouldn't be anything for me to blackmail you with.”

There was a twitch. It was almost imperceptible, but it was there. Did she have something that could be used against her? She was violent, it was true, and I'd seen her beating up on some of the gang kids every now and again. She'd wiped the floor with them. How did a girl my age beat kids who outweighed her by forty to sixty pounds?

She'd been trained somewhere.

Clearly she wasn't a member of any of the major gangs. The Empire hated blacks, the ABB only took Asians, and she didn't show any signs of being the kind of person who would be with the Merchants. There were other, smaller gangs in town, but not many, and those tended to be transient and were often consumed into the larger gangs around them shortly after they were introduced.

“It's not like you are secretly a member of...well,” I said.

Her eye twitched.

“You're full of shit, Hebert,” she said. “You don't know anything.”

She turned away, quickly, though, and Emma's look of shock at what I'd said sealed the deal. Madison only looked confused, confirming what I'd already concluded about being outside the loop.

Sophia Hess had received combat training from somewhere.

It wasn't one of the major gangs, and you didn't get combat skills like she'd had from a weekend or even a month of training. None of the minor gangs had lasted long enough to train her like that. She could have simply been with a martial arts club, but a lot of them had extra flourishes. They were sports instead of actual combat skills. Her fighting style was direct and brutal.

The only other large gang in town, by one meaning of the word was the Protectorate and the PRT. The PRT didn't accept people Sophia's age, not even as interns. The legal liability was too high.

The most likely conclusion was that she had powers, and that she was a Ward.

None of the other capes in town fit her description. They were either too male, too white, too Asian, or didn't fit her body type. Vista was too small and white, which left Shadow Stalker.

Sophia was Shadow Stalker.

***

Leverage