Cell 22.6

Posted on May 16, 2013 by wildbow

591

Dragon’s craft closed the distance to the rooftop’s edge, using precise adjustments to almost freeze in mid-air as it hovered. It was gentle and graceful in comparison to Defiant’s squat, durable tank. I wondered how intentional that was. Just looking at it, I had little doubt that it was even longer range than any of the other models I’d crossed paths with. I was put in mind of a sniper rifle, long, narrow, sleek and focused in its almost singular design. The stability it had fit with the idea. A stark contrast to Defiant’s craft, which seemed more like the type to be in the thick of a fight, fighting alongside him and complementing his fighting style.

Not that the aesthetics of Dragon’s work was really a priority right this moment.

“A mistake,” I said.

“We know how she operates,” Defiant said. “Dragon, Miss Militia and I have each worked directly under Alexandria at some point. It’s something of an unofficial policy to have anyone that’s being considered for a leadership position working under each member of the triumvirate for a time.”

“Must have been real fun for you guys when you found out what they’re really like, last month.”

“Not fun at all,” Miss Militia said. She had to stoop to exit the ship and step onto the roof’s edge.

“We’ve seen how Alexandria handles interrogations,” Defiant said. “She reads microexpressions. Shapes every statement and action to get the responses she wants.”

“And she wanted this?” I asked.

Defiant shook his head. “Knowing her, this was a gambit. It wouldn’t do to have one workable outcome. She pushes you, and if you attack, she has cause to finish you off or send you straight to the birdcage without a trial. If you don’t attack, she knows she has leverage against you and the Undersiders. She’d see which way you were leaning, then refine her approach further.”

“And here I was,” Miss Militia mused, “Thinking you didn’t have a head for this sort of thing, Defiant.”

“I’ve had help,” he said, glancing at Dragon.

“But she didn’t get either of those results,” I said. “At least, not like she wanted. For all her brains, for all this apparent ability to read me, she… didn’t understand what my friends mean to me.”

“I think she understood well enough,” Defiant said. “But the mistake, the tragedy in all of this, was that she didn’t get an accurate read on you. Much, I expect, for the same reason my lie detector could never seem to. She was working with bad information, and she pushed you too far, too fast.”

An eerie parallel to mistakes Tattletale had made in the past. And I killed Alexandria and Tagg because of it.

“And… my friends? Just to make sure. They’re okay?”

“Alexandria didn’t touch them. The ones she brought into the building were body doubles, and the real Undersiders are poised to attack in-” Miss Militia reached for her phone.

“Fifteen minutes,” Defiant said.

“Fifteen minutes,” Miss Militia said. “In the meantime, we’re trying to deal with your lawyer, who got his hands on the footage of the interrogation and is threatening to bring hell down on our heads-”

Earning his pay, I thought.

She continued without pause. “-And we still have to find a way to handle this without a complete PR catastrophe. Once the media gets hold of this, we lose the ability to control the situation.”

“Dragon is managing the details as we speak,” Defiant said. “She can isolate and track digital communication, but she can’t stop the spread of word of mouth. Chevalier’s doing what he can on his end, but the PRT agents that confirmed Alexandria’s death won’t be able to keep their mouths shut forever, not with something as grave as this.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Miss Militia said.

“Fourteen,” Defiant cut in, correcting her.

“Fourteen minutes,” she said, “That’s our working timeline. Even if Skitter were to call off the Undersiders, we have information leaks.”

“Then what if we let it leak?” I asked. “We say ‘fuck it, the PRT is fucked, Alexandria is a monster, let people figure it out for themselves.'”

“You don’t really want that,” Miss Militia said.

“The system is fucked,” I said. “Everything that’s happened, it’s taught me a few things. People are fucked up, for one thing. And any organization that has people in control is going to be fucked on an exponential level. But for all that, people are a hell of a lot tougher than we give them credit for. We survive. We innovate. So yeah, I’m seriously thinking along those lines. I wouldn’t mind seeing the PRT burn, damn it, because I think we’ll make it regardless.”

“Why?” Miss Militia asked. “What changed your mind from the moment you decided to surrender? Your friends weren’t at risk, you already knew something about Tagg and Alexandria.”

“You,” I told her. “You were part of it.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Exactly.”

“You can’t blame me for standing out of the way. You had a plan, Alexandria told me she had a plan, and nobody shared anything substantial with me. I couldn’t take a step without risking that I’d get in someone’s way.”

I frowned.

“You’re hurt, you’re angry, you’re still reeling from what you thought happened,” Miss Militia said. “Fine. That’s fair. But we don’t have time to work through that. You said you wanted to work together, to compromise. Do you stand by that? Are you willing to at least try a workable solution? Or are you going to keep fighting us?”

I glanced at Defiant. “I’ll hear you out.”

“We need you to call your team and get them to stand down. We can’t have bloodshed, and we can’t have Tattletale divulging critical information.”

I folded my arms. “Meet me halfway.”

“Twelve minutes,” Defiant said. “This isn’t the time to be hard-nosed. You don’t want this fight any more than we do. If this happens, your team will be at a very real risk of death or arrest. Three of the A.I. models, Dragon’s, mine, the Brockton Bay heroes and no less than ten visiting heroes.”

“This is exactly the time to be hard-nosed. The Undersiders get left alone. Those are my terms. Figure it the fuck out.”

There was a pause, an exchange of looks between Defiant and Dragon.

“We’re talking to Chevalier and the Chief Director,” Defiant said.

“Good,” I answered him.

A few seconds passed. I glanced at the sun, dipping beneath the mountains to the west.

“Miss Militia will fill in as an interim PRT director,” a male voice sounded from the speaker at Dragon’s shoulder. Chevalier. “I’ll arrange it. We have leverage, with the current state of emergency and the issues that are liable to come up with the announcement that we can make use of the portal.“

“And I’ll remain hands off, unless I’m replaced or I have no other choice?” Miss Militia said.

“We’ll keep you in position for as long as we can, postpone any changes or replacements until people get more comfortable with the idea. With luck, we can segue into keeping you in position on a permanent basis. Failing that, we tap someone sympathetic to our aims.”

“Damn it,” Miss Militia muttered. “I feel like my lifespan just got cut short. Double the work, too.”

“We’ll figure out a way to make it work,” Defiant said. He looked at me. “Satisfactory?”

“Yes. Phone?”

Miss Militia tapped out a password, then handed me hers.

I dialed Tattletale’s number.

When Tattletale didn’t pick up on the first ring, I felt my heart jump into my throat. She’d never done that.

“‘Lo,” Tattletale said. I let myself breathe a sigh of relief. She continued, “Call display says PRT Phone server. Who am I talking to?“

“It’s me,” I said.

“You! You wouldn’t believe how worried I’ve been. Or the headache I have. You know they gave you bad info?”

“I know,” I said.

“The stuff you were writing, it didn’t match up. Tried to tell you, but you couldn’t understand me.”

“I know,” I said. “Just tell me… everyone’s safe?”

“Everyone’s accounted for. Shit, what did they do?”

“Tattletale-”

“They tried something. What happened?”

“Tattletale,” I said, raising my voice a notch. “Time’s short. Call off the hounds, literal or otherwise. Delay.”

“Delay?”

“They’re making temporary offers,” I said, eyeing the heroes, “We can make some temporary concessions.”

“Okay. But I can’t hold back some of the bastards we put into play. I can stop them, but that’s it. They’ll leave, and we’re that much weaker.”

“That’s fine,” I told her. “These guys are at a bit of a disadvantage too.”

“Okay… let’s see… alright. Holding off for… half an hour? Adding fifteen minutes to the clock?” Tattletale asked.

“Longer?” I asked.

“Any longer and more mercenaries start walking away, deciding to take the half we paid up front.”

“That’ll do, then, I guess.” I said, giving the heroes a thumbs up.

“You said they’re weaker, huh? So it’s true. I didn’t want to use my power to verify… but the rumor mill is right? Alexandria bit it?“

“Yes. I-” I stopped.

“You? You did it?” Tattletale asked. “Guys-”

Her voice faded as she turned away from the phone.

“Don’t tell them,” I said, once I realized what she was saying.

It was too late. I could hear jeers and whooping from Regent and Imp in the background. I couldn’t make out everything Grue was saying, but I caught something along the lines of ‘Jesus H. Fucking Christ.‘

“It’s too late to matter, honey bear,” Tattletale said. “I don’t have much juice powerwise, but I don’t need any to know this much. Word’s already out about Alexandria.”

“Word’s out about Alexandria,” I said, for the benefit of the heroes.

Defiant folded his arms.

“Anything else I can do?” she asked.

“Stay near a phone. Thank you,” I said. And keep the jailbreak specialists on hand, I thought. Not that I could say that with the Protectorate members around me.

“One disaster averted,” Miss Militia said.

“Held at bay,” Defiant said. “The word’s spreading. It’s starting to pop up on isolated channels.”

“We’ll need to get our official word out first,” Miss Militia said.

“What do you even say?” I asked. “She’s dead.”

“And that will make a lot of people lose hope,” Miss Militia said. “We have other ideas, but we need something bigger, more concrete.”

“But she’s dead,” I said. “The only way to change the reaction is to convince everyone we have a winning game plan anyways. That the PRT isn’t fucked, which it is.”

“The A.I. craft,” Defiant said, turning to look at the Pendragon. “Expendable, versatile, devastating in their own right, and there’s image attached to them. They’ll get the public’s imagination fired up.”

Miss Militia shook her head. “There’ll be doubts, it’s not enough. Behemoth can generate electromagnetic waves that wipe out electronics. Even many reinforced electronics, if he’s close enough. The Simurgh can scramble coding. We don’t just have to convince the public. We need to convince the heroes, and they know these things.”

“And they know what the difference is going to be, without Alexandria on the front lines,” Defiant said. He sighed audibly. “Four times now, she’s been the deciding factor in beating the Simurgh back early. Once with Leviathan, when I was new to the Protectorate.”

“We can reduce the impact of the loss with careful word choice and a good speech,” Miss Militia said. “If Skitter is willing to call off her other dogs.”

I glanced at the phone in my hand. “Okay.”

“No demands this time?”

“Believe it or not, I want to fix things,” I said, as I dialed Mr. Calle’s number. “We’re on the same side here. The difference is I consider my friends to be a part of a workable scenario. I have my issues with you guys, but I’m extending the benefit of a doubt again, and I’m hoping it doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass. Again.”

The phone rang. Mr. Calle answered. “Quinn Calle speaking.”

“It’s Taylor Hebert.”

“Ah, excellent. I’d feared they’d executed you or sent you to be incarcerated.”

“I’m sorry for, um, that,” I said.

“They had one of your good friends in a body bag, or they led you to believe they did. You reacted as many would, with anger and pain. You were simply, how to put it… better equipped than the rest of us mere mortals to express that anger and pain.”

“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d left.”

“Rest assured, Ms. Hebert, I’ve dealt with worse.”

“Okay,” I said. “I need you to back off on whatever threats you’re directing at the PRT.”

“No can do, I’m afraid.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because, right at this moment, you’re in the custody of the heroes. They’ve given you a phone, no doubt, and they’ve caught you at an emotionally vulnerable moment. For your benefit, I can’t assume you’re of sound mind or that you aren’t being coerced.”

“How do we change your mind?”

“I wouldn’t mind an invitation to the discussion.”

“We’re sending a vehicle your way,” I said. “Where are you?”

“The lovely little shop with the donuts I visited this morning.”

“Okay,” I said, putting my hand over the mouthpiece, “He says-”

I stopped. The armored suit Miss Militia had left was already moving, heading directly for my territory. She’d been listening in.

“Never mind.”

“Let’s talk about our game plan,” Miss Militia said. “We’ve got the peripheral stuff in the works. You’re bringing the suits in?”

“Yes,” Defiant said. “She is. Chevalier is on the way as well, and we’ve contacted the media.”

Miss Militia nodded. “The two major crises are being held at bay, thanks to Skitter’s cooperation. We can’t keep the word from spreading through other channels, so let’s cover every base we can. We only get one shot at this.”

“Key points being Skitter’s role in this, and addressing how we deal with Alexandria’s demise,” Defiant said.

“My role?” I asked. “I thought you wanted me to call off the attack?”

“No,” Miss Militia said. “There’s more.”

I narrowed my eyes, very conscious of the fact that there were three rather powerful capes and one mechanized suit in my immediate vicinity. “What more?”

She glanced at Defiant, then back to me. “We’d like you to be there for the conference with the media. Dragon’s going over footage, and so long as your lawyer doesn’t release the unedited content, we can hide the worst of the details from the media. Shape the narrative.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“We’re revising the truth,” she said. She paused. “Yes. We’re lying.”

“And you want me to participate in that?”

“Yes. Your presence will lend a degree of legitimacy to what we’re saying. We’re on opposite sides, in the public eye, making it all the more meaningful if we agree on what happened.”

“Are you fighting to keep the PRT going, or are you working to rebuild it?” I asked.

“Rebuild it,” she said. No hesitation.

“And you’re doing it by starting with a lie. Just like they did.”

“Yes,” she said. Again, there was no hesitation. “There’s no pretty, perfect answers, and concessions have to be made. Questions and issues on a greater scale mean more repercussions for failure, and they call for bigger concessions if we want to ensure success.”

“And this is a big event, a lot of power,” I said. “Big concessions?”

“Yes,” she said. She looked ten times as tired as she said it.

I folded my arms. I couldn’t disagree. I didn’t like it. But I’d been a leader. I’d made shady calls. I’d hurt people. Had lied, cheated, stolen, killed.

The sun was gone, hidden by the mountains, and the clouds were changing from purple to black. How long until the new deadline? Twenty minutes?

I could see Defiant, saw him conversing with Dragon and Miss Militia.

I saw how he folded his arms, still holding his spear, so it rested against his shoulder. How he planted his feet further apart. A warrior’s stance.

It inspired a memory, of my first night out in costume. The bad guy lying defeated on the street below, the city quiet around us, the dark sky overhead, with only meager light illuminating us. Framing the situation, talking about options and priorities.

Not so different from the scene here. The villain wasn’t here. Alexandria had fallen a distance away. But the city was quiet, the area still blockaded, the sky was dark, and the topic of discussion…

I thought of something, one moment in that night’s discussion when I’d thought that maybe Armsmaster could live up to the reputation, that he could really truly be someone who I could look up to.

“Hey,” I said.

Heads turned my way.

“As far as Alexandria goes, what if we turn it around?”

“Turn it around?”

“Way back, when I first started out in costume, I had a talk with Armsmaster. He told me that I should be happy I was mistaken for a villain, because it meant I didn’t have to fight the Undersiders. This was before I joined them. It reminded me of how I’d been trying to deal with the shit I was going through back then, turning negatives into positives. I think we can do that here.”

“How?” Miss Militia asked. She glanced at Dragon’s craft, just now arriving to bring my lawyer to us.

“So long as we’re lying,” I said, “Let’s go wholesale. We present Alexandria as the villain she was.”

“That’ll make the situation worse,” Miss Militia said.

“It depends on how we present the idea,” I said.

Dragon’s suit once again came to a stop at the edge of the roof, as it had when it had delivered Miss Militia. It turned sideways, and the body opened, revealing my lawyer, looking more stressed than I’d seen him, in the midst of a rather compact cockpit.

Mr. Calle accepted Miss Militia’s offered hand in stepping down to the rooftop, and seemed to relax the instant his feet touched solid ground.

“Whoo,” he said. “Never let it be said that my job isn’t an adventure. You’re well, Ms. Hebert?”

“I am.”

“You haven’t made any deals?”

“Nothing permanent.”

“Good.”

Dragon touched my shoulder. When I turned her way, she set her fingers in my hand, pulling me after her with the light contact of two of her fingertips. Gentle, easy to avoid, but clear enough.

I followed as she led me to her hovering Dragon-craft, Mr. Calle a step behind me. Mr. Calle had longer legs than I did, but he was the one who hesitated at the gap before stepping into the open cockpit.

Once I was on board, Dragon reached over to the wall and opened a shallow drawer, no more than three inches deep. The drawer opened with a noise like something from a science fiction movie.

I stared at the contents.

“How?” I asked, and all of the confidence was gone from my voice. “Wait, nevermind. You’re fu- you’re tinkers, damn it.”

Mr. Calle stepped up beside me, placing one hand on my shoulder in an uncharacteristic need for some support. He looked down. “I take it we’ve reached something of a consensus here?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“Yes,” Defiant said, from the rooftop.

“Then it seems I need to draw up some paperwork,” Mr. Calle said. “For formality’s sake, if nothing else.”

“Do it in five minutes,” Miss Militia said, from Defiant’s side. “We’re out of time. The media’s here.”

“Five?” Mr. Calle seemed momentarily pained. “Paper, fast.”

Dragon handed him a sleek keyboard, pointing to a screen. He started typing.

“I’ll credit you this, Ms. Hebert,” my lawyer said, as he typed away, tabbing to different windows to draw up pages he could copy-paste from. “You manage a great deal of grief and chaos in very short spans of time.”

■

Chevalier had arrived, and stepped into the cockpit. Gold and silver armor, his cannonblade resting against one shoulder. He briefly clasped hands with Defiant.

I stopped tidying my hair long enough to take the stylus from Dragon, scribbling my signature on the offered pad. Others were already present – Miss Militia’s and Defiant’s. The Chief Director’s signature appeared as the document was signed from a remote location.

“You’re ready?” Chevalier asked me.

I shook my head. “No.”

“But you’re willing?”

“Yeah,” I said. I rubbed my arms, then zipped up my prison-issue sweatshirt. “Has to be done, doesn’t it?”

“It’s not pretty,” he said. “There’s a lot of ugliness in this. But yes. This gives us the best chance.”

I nodded. I still had Miss Militia’s phone. I dialed Tattletale.

“Yo?“

“Turn on the TV,” I said. “And call them off. Unless something goes horribly wrong, this is it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” I said. No, I thought.

I hung up.

All together, we stepped out of the cockpit and walked around the craft.

The Wards were here. Clockblocker, Vista, Kid Win and Crucible, standing on guard.

Rounding the corner, we approached the open street where the crowd of reporters waited. Television cameras shifted to focus on the reporters announcing our arrival, or to follow us as we walked. Tripod-mounted lights cast shafts of light across the road, all converging on one point, the makeshift stage – the flat ledge of the Dragon-suit’s wing, five feet off the ground. Voices bubbled around us, a million questions, almost a singular noise.

Chevalier stepped forward, and they simultaneously drew quiet. He had a presence, a kind of nobility that garnered respect.

“Today, not two hours ago, Alexandria was killed.”

I could barely see the reporters past the massive lights that were shedding light on the stage, on us. They were solemn, focused on every single word. They didn’t even flinch at the news. They’d already known.

“Alexandria was a veteran among capes. She was one of the first capes, one who was present for almost every major catastrophe in the last twenty years. With every challenge she surmounted, she reaffirmed our belief in her, showed us how strong she was, how impervious and noble she was.”

He lowered his head. I resisted the urge to fidget. This was showing live, to homes across America.

On a rooftop nearby, capes teleported in. Other capes, flying, were touching down on top of a news car. Dovetail, with Sere beside her.

“If that was it, this would be hard enough,” he spoke. “But she was a mythic figure in her own way. She was a living symbol, recognized across the world. She was a leader among us. She was a friend to some of us.”

I sensed rather than saw Eidolon, hovering well above the reach of the lights. Legend was close too, though less intent on hiding.

I steeled myself for what came next, willing myself to stay calm, to not give anything away.

“And she was a traitor.”

That garnered a response from the news reporters. Shouted questions pierced the silence that loomed in the wake of Chevalier’s words.

He continued. “When Alexandria was slain, earlier today, it was done by individuals standing on this stage.”

Every word carefully chosen, so it was technically or at least partially true. Alexandria was a traitor, with her involvement with Cauldron, she had been slain at the hands of someone on the stage.

“There are individuals out there right now, who have kept quiet about recent events. Only last month, there was an event in this city, a threat that was theorized to be a nascent Endbringer. In the wake of that event, Alexandria was revealed to be partially responsible.”

The reporters, I noted, were deathly still. Deer in the headlights.

“Good capes,” Chevalier said, “Burdened by conscience, walked away from the PRT. Without them to serve as our backbone, we were left gutted. There has been rampant speculation on what has been going on within the PRT, on what might have caused so many capes to abandon it. We –they– couldn’t speak because Alexandria held a position of power, because she was purportedly invincible, unassailable. Because of the threat she posed, and the resources she had at her disposal.”

Others were joining the crowd of reporters. Civilians, returning now that the blockades had been taken down, maybe going home, only to see the scene, the heroes in the spotlight. They clustered, or parked at the periphery of the crowd, getting out of their cars.

How many millions were tuning in right this moment?

“Some of us left, because their consciences couldn’t bear serving a corrupt power. Others, many of us on the stage included, stayed, because we felt the PRT, the Protectorate, the Wards program and the teams that draw on us for resources were too important. I’m not here to say one decision was better than the other, or to lay blame with those who sided with her. In coming weeks and months, our capes, accountants and lawyers will be meeting with anyone and everyone in a position of power within the Protectorate program or the PRT, ensuring nothing of this scale occurs again.”

Something moved into my range. An insect. Large.

Atlas.

I moved him experimentally, and felt how incredibly weary he was. His reserves of energy were drained, his body dying. His forelegs touched the walls around him. He’d been placed in the back of a van.

And the occupants of that van – bugs entered open windows to make contact with the others. Lisa, Brian, Alec and Aisha. I could hear the echo, time delayed by five seconds, as they watched Chevalier speak on a tablet PC.

“Alexandria betrayed us on a fundamental level, and the whole cape community has felt that. The public has felt that. I urge people not to blame her. She had no less than eighteen fights against the Simurgh. We had been led to believe her powers rendered her immune, but she was clever enough to hide and alter the evidence. She was a victim, and it’s a testament to her character that she fought off the Simurgh’s influence for as long as she did.”

And there’s the first egregious lie, I thought.

With luck, nobody would believe anyone that was callous enough to point it out. Nobody would want to believe them. It was an ugly thought, that Alexandria could be twisted to act against our interests just because of who she was. She’d worked with Cauldron, had experimented on humans, all in the interest of… what? Creating powers? Selling them?

I swallowed hard. I knew what came next.

“It was due to a concerted effort this evening that we were able to stop Alexandria before more damage could be done.”

Chevalier reached out, put a hand on my shoulder. He drew me closer to him, until I stood in front of him and he had both hands resting on my shoulders.

“Many will recognize Taylor Hebert, revealed to be Skitter in a controversial confrontation at the school just a week ago, a confrontation Alexandria ordered. Taylor Hebert played a crucial role in stopping Alexandria in a moment of crisis, ending the fight.”

And now half the world hates me, I thought, staring forward. The glare was so intense I thought my eyes might start crossing. And the other half… I don’t know what the other half thinks.

I’d agreed to share ‘credit’ for the kill, but only because there had been a consensus that people wouldn’t believe it if I took sole responsibility.

Chevalier wasn’t speaking. I saw a red light go on at the corner of my collar. The microphone Dragon had clipped there was live. The signals would be received by all equipped, official cameras. Something the PRT had arranged for convenience’s sake some time ago.

I had a chance to speak in my own defense, in front of countless tens or hundreds of millions of eyes, and the words were dying in my throat.

My thoughts were grinding to a standstill. What was I supposed to say? We’d barely had any time to prepare. We hadn’t had time to prepare.

There were whole lines I was supposed to give. Ideas I was supposed to express, striking the right tone, and I’d gone blank.

I couldn’t defend myself like this, even with rehearsed lines.

Chevalier rescued me. He spoke, his voice clear. “This isn’t a happy day.”

It was a reminder of what my line was supposed to be. I’m not proud, I’m not happy that it came to this…

“It’s not a happy day, but it’s a good day,” he said, skipping ahead two or so minutes. “It marks change, and it marks a step forward. A chance to fight Endbringers and other threats without sabotage, without worrying who stands beside us, or whether our leadership is compromised.”

Dragon’s ships descended from the sky above. My hair and the hood of my sweatshirt flapped as the vessels landed to either side of us. Eleven vessels. The ones we’d destroyed had been rebuilt, updated. Others, old Dragon suits, had apparently been set up with A.I. to fly on their own. They gleamed, various shades of chrome and gunmetal, with trim in different metals and colors for decoration and highlighting.

She had more made, I thought.

“A chance to fight Endbringers without as many casualties,” Chevalier said. “And hope. We’ve investigated the portal to another world, and confirmed that there are resources and even shelter, a possibility of escape in a time of emergency.”

I stared at the van where the Undersiders were.

“And new allies, as unlikely as they might be.”

His hands dropped from my shoulders.

I reached up to the zipper of my sweatshirt. I pulled it down, then shrugged out of it. Chevalier took the piece of clothing in one hand.

I bent over and stepped out of the loose-fitting prison sweats as well.

Defiant handed me my new mask, and I pulled it on. Electric blue lenses, the opposite of the yellow I’d worn before. They helped with the glare, though they weren’t so good against it as my old lenses.

Light gray fabric where I’d had black. Armor panels in the same dark gray as before, albeit with cleaner lines, less bulk, and less in the way of edges. I had no points at the tips of my gloves, and both the mantle around my shoulders and the cloth that hung around my belt were marked with an electric blue border, with my gang emblem in miniature at each corner, flipped upside down so they faced skyward, altered to match my new color scheme.

“I admitted to reprehensible things,” I said. “I won’t challenge that, or pretend I didn’t say or do those things. By all rights, I should go to jail. I may serve a sentence, if the courts will it. I won’t challenge that.”

I paused. For a terrifying moment, I thought I’d forget what to say again. Then I fixed my eyes on the windshield of the van, at the far end of the crowd.

It struck me that I hadn’t suffered stage fright. It had been something else entirely. I hadn’t wanted to speak, because there would be no going back.

When I finally spoke, I didn’t follow the cues I’d been given. My eyes didn’t leave the spot where the Undersiders were watching from.

“I seized a territory in Brockton Bay. I led the local villains, and we defeated all comers. I was secure in my position. I had wealth, friendship, love and respect. People depended on me. It was everything I’d ever wanted, if not quite the way I’d initially imagined it. I could have stayed and been comfortable.

“Except there are bigger things. More important things.”

The eyes and cameras on me made me feel like I was deep in the ocean, a crushing weight pressing down on me.

“I believe in the idea of a new PRT that Chevalier is talking about. I believe in it enough that I was willing to turn myself in and take action to bring it to fruition. That I was willing to leave everything I had behind. If I have to serve time in jail first, then so be it. If I face the Birdcage… I hope I don’t. But at least I could tell myself that seeing the supervillain step up might convince others to come back. Change the minds of heroes who gave up on the PRT for one reason or another.”

A lump welled in my throat. I knew I didn’t have many more words left before I wouldn’t be able to speak.

“This is what I want to do, above all else,” I said, and I said it to the Undersiders. “Given the chance, I’ll serve the people. As I fought Leviathan, the Slaughterhouse Nine and other evils, I’ll fight to the last gasp to protect all of you. When-“

A howling in the distance interrupted me.

Moments later, others took up the cry. Ten dogs, then twenty. Others took up the cry around the city, from various shelters and homes. A hundred, two hundred dogs, and the wolf cub that had started them off.

“-When and if I do take up the job,” I finished, speaking around the growing lump in my throat, “You can call me Weaver.”

Chevalier set a hand on my shoulder.

“That’ll be all,” the hero said. “We’ll have another statement and a conference to answer questions early tomorrow, when we know more for sure.”

The reporters were already calling out questions. Is this the first time you’ve recruited a villain? How did Alexandria die? What crimes did she commit, exactly?

Cell 22.5

Posted on May 14, 2013 by wildbow

427

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Abandoned.

The word hit me before I was fully conscious, as though my brain had grasped the idea before I even had half of a brain functioning.

My father, gone. My lawyer was gone as well. Not such a big surprise. I’d gone all out, held little back, and I’d given no apparent justification. To them, to my dad especially, I would have looked like a monster.

Fitting, because I’d been one. I was one. Was that a label that was affixed to me permanently, now?

My mind was wandering more than it should have. My head hurt. I tried to focus, turning to my bugs.

Except my swarm was nearly gone. Only a small fraction remained. Hundreds, if that. My bugs had carried out the last order I’d given them, to attack, before I was knocked out. I knew that. What confused me were the other behaviors my bugs had performed.

They’d spread out and searched my surroundings, and they’d been gunned down en masse by Kid Win’s drones. I could sort of understand that, especially if they were actively searching for the last targets I’d given them. That, and I could picture myself unconsciously wanting to check for incoming threats and assess the battlefield before the tranquilizer took hold. Odd, fucking inconvenient, but understandable.

But the fact that bugs had spent the time I was out to weave lengths of silk cord? That was unusual, something out of place. It was something I’d taken to having my bugs handle in the background at any given moment, but why would I carry it out in my sleep? I was pretty sure I hadn’t given that order, which left only three real possibilities. Either my unconscious mind had willed it while I slept, or my passenger had. Unnerving.

More unnerving was the third possibility – that there wasn’t a real distinction between my unconscious mind and the passenger.

I sat up, contorted in pain as I felt bruises and cuts making themselves known, and then groaned as my expression shifted and I felt the damage above and around my eye. There was a wound: my skin had split, and the tightness coupled with the crusty wet sensation suggested drying blood.

My glasses were screwed up too. Tagg had knocked one lens out of the frame when he’d slammed my face into the table. My vision was oddly dreamlike, blurry through my right eye, too crisp through my left. I moved my hands to move the glasses, and felt the heavy-duty cuffs encasing them. The sort of handcuffs reserved for low-level Brutes, that covered my hands entirely, each hand welded to the other.

I was in the PRT offices. I was back in my cell.

As far as I could tell, the building was empty. My power reached five blocks, and… nothing. There were no people. Computers were active, television screens were glowing with shifting images, and cars sat in the middle of the road outside, but the people were gone.

Evacuation? When my power hadn’t stopped, the PRT would have ordered people to clear out of the area.

Maybe they weren’t sure if my power would keep going if they shot me.

I stood and rolled my shoulders, feeling things pop, grind and sing with pain in response to the movement. I’d had my hands fixed in front of me for the better part of the day, with only a brief respite in my cell while I’d showered.

Showering… it made me think of being in my lair after the first night I’d been with Brian.

I pushed it out of my mind, and Rachel appeared instead, stepping to fill the blank in my mind’s eye.

As if I were suddenly channeling her, I struck at the door with the restraints that encased my hands. Metal struck metal, the strike barely denting the brushed stainless steel of the door’s surface.

A rapid, high-pitched beeping sounded from above me. I looked up at the orb just in time to see it lighting up. I threw myself to the ground, felt the shock jolt through me.

If I’d been sore before, the jolt cranked it up to ten. I felt my mind go white, heat coiling through the interior of my body, as though it were dancing around my internal organs and bones. The strength went out of me; my cuffs were too heavy, and I didn’t have the ability to hold them up. I fell, as though the restraints were an anchor pulling me down.

I could feel my muscles twitching in a way that seemed like it was intentionally making the sorest parts of me move.

“Do not disturb the peace of your cell. This deterrence measure was calculated at twenty percent of your overall capacity. The next response will be at twice the strength. Thank you,” the automated voice informed me.

For long minutes, I lay there, spasming and searching the building with surviving bugs, because doing anything else was impossible or futile.

Needed out.

How had they unlocked my cell and the interrogation room? They’d had phones. PRT issue, probably, and had tapped the phone against the wall.

Phones… there were no PRT officers in the building.

In the morgue… there was a body bag. Bugs clung to it.

Brian? Rachel? Someone else?

I sent bugs over to explore it. One centipede to latch the zipper, other bugs to haul it back.

It was Tagg, dead.

I’d killed a man, and I had done it with my power, which somehow felt more intimate than the gun that killed Coil. My power made the bugs an extension of myself, and I’d used them to murder the man. It was little different from wrapping my hands around his throat and squeezing, or biting him in the throat and tearing deep enough that he couldn’t survive.

I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything meaningful about it. I wanted to. I wanted to think of his daughters, apparently college students overseas, and his apparently loving wife, and the fact that I’d just taken a member of their family from them, much as my mom had been taken from me. I wanted to feel terrible, to cry, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I felt bad, but not as bad as I should have.

No. I could only see the bully, the monster, the threat he posed to the city or the world. To my team.

Or was that the threat he had posed? Was it too late to save them?

I couldn’t check the time without sacrificing bugs to the patrolling drones. However long I’d been out, the remainder of the Undersiders could be embroiled in an all-out war.

Tagg, I thought. Have to focus.

His phone was in his jacket pocket, his key ring in his pants pocket. Getting the items to me would be harder. There were closed doors, vents, the elevator and the blocked elevator shaft. The morgue was in a separate building, joined to the PRT office at one corner.

Worse, the numerous skirmishes in, outside and around the building had led to there being a great deal of renovation and rebuilding. New things were that much harder to get bugs through. There were no open grates, no gaps in air conditioning ducts or anything in that vein.

There had to be a way. I was down to a few hundred bugs. Barely enough to matter. I wasn’t about to brute force my way through anything.

I thought of the hole Alexandria had put in the roof during her hurried exit. It was the most indirect way, getting bugs from the basement of one building outside, to the roof, and back down to the basement of the next building… but it was a path. If there were barriers I wasn’t sensing, I’d handle them.

Working together, bugs began dragging the keys and smart phone down the hall to the mortician’s office. Windows, squat, looked out at the parking lot, no doubt intended more to bring natural light into the office than for the sake of the view. I knew before approaching them that the windows were open – there was fresh air flowing into the hallway, and my bugs could sense the shifting air currents.

A screen blocked the way. Not a serious issue. The bugs started chewing through the individual wires, while the bugs with the phone and key ring began binding the items in silk, connecting them to a line.

Minutes passed while the bugs made their way up to the hole in the roof, down the shaft to the Wards headquarters one floor below me, and to the elevator.

The stairwell was blocked off, the elevator… the buttons.

I had the largest bug ram it.

Nothing. Feeble at best.

The wiring. Could I hotwire it like someone hotwired a car?

Getting into the walls wasn’t as hard as it should have been. Rachel had done a little damage when she’d attacked with the dogs a week ago. Even though they’d shored it up and sealed the exterior from the interior, there were gaps that I could use to get inside from the building’s interior, much as I’d done when disconnecting the outlet for Kid Win’s drone recharging station.

The actual connection… the damn thing seemed to be reinforced, with thick wires and a button mechanism that was too heavy to move from within. The bugs themselves couldn’t form a live connection between the button and the contact.

A workaround. I used cockroaches to carefully strip away insulation, two centipedes positioning themselves so their mandibles were above two respective pieces of wire, their tail ends entwined with one another. Then they let themselves drop. Their bodies bridged the gap between the wire behind the contact and the wiring by the button.

The centipedes died in an instant, and the door opened.

I dragged the smart phone and keys in, being careful to use bugs to bridge the gap so the phone and the keys wouldn’t fall through, and then let the elevator carry the bugs to the floor above. The doors opened automatically as the elevator arrived, and I brought the items out the same way.

The bugs began the slow process of bringing the phone to a point high enough on the wall. I spent the time recovering, flexing my muscles until I was sure they moved right. I had to draw out more silk to have a line strong enough, and set to reeling it in, anchoring end at the corner of the door frame, pushing up with the bugs and looping any slack around the corner of metal.

It wasn’t halfway up when the heroes arrived to collect their prisoner. A vibration through the building as a heavy vehicle landed on the helicopter pad on the roof. Four legged, with turbines in the place of wings, and a neckless head. A man stepped out. Defiant.

Dragon arrived as Defiant reached the elevator door on the rooftop. My bugs inside continued the glacial process of raising the phone to the necessary height, while the ones outside clustered on Defiant and Dragon. They knew I was here. There was no reason to be subtle. The only thing I had to be careful of was keeping Defiant from killing the swarm with one of his bug zapping tricks.

His focus was on his phone and the door, instead. He was typing something. A password?

If one was required to access the phone, I was screwed. If it was access specific…

I memorized the sequence. Now I had the problem of using it on the touch screen of the smart phone.

If it was pressure sensitive, then I could use it.

If it was heat-sensitive…

Bugs approached the fluorescent lightbulbs in the hallway outside, warming themselves until their wings and legs threatened to burn up.

The pair of heroes was halfway to the elevator on the top floor when the phone reached the correct height. Bugs I’d warmed on the bulbs moved to the keyboard, copying the same sequence of movements I’d tracked with the bugs on Defiant’s glove and phone.

The door slid open.

I dropped to my hands and knees to get the phone in my teeth, stooped down so the bugs with the keys could latch on to my gauntlet-restraints, then speed-hobbled for the elevator, chains at my ankles clanking.

I hit the button a second before Defiant hit the one on the top floor. The doors opened immediately.

They hadn’t reacted yet. The delay before the elevator moved hadn’t registered with them. Once they saw the elevator moving… they would expect me to run, cut me off.

Fuck that.

Had to second guess them, which was harder than it sounded, because they weren’t dumb. If they expected me to make a break for the ground floor, I’d have to do something else.

I leaned back against the wall and used my bare toe to hit the button for the first and third floors. That done, I turned my attention to the keys. The phone went into one pocket, moved by a swarm of bugs and the slope of my arm. When that was done, smaller bugs searched the keyhole at the base of my restraints to gauge the width. Other bugs marked the keys that fit the same size, yet others holding the ring against my restraints so I could use my teeth to pick through them, sliding them around the ring when they weren’t appropriate. Cockroaches wedged themselves in between keys to speed the process along.

Defiant and Dragon were moving. Dragon opened a window and moved outside, while Defiant headed into the stairwell. They wanted to cut me off on the ground floor.

They could communicate without talking. Some kind of system built into their masks. It made this harder. I couldn’t listen in and anticipate what they were saying.

By the time I passed the first floor, they were turning around. I hurried to the stairwell, and took the stairs two at a time in a hurry to get up to the second floor.

Just inside the door, I used my toes to ease it closed, then crouched to stay out of sight as Dragon patrolled outside, peeking in the windows.

I tried a key, sliding it into the hole before successfully turning it with my teeth. My lips came in contact with the cockroaches I was using to guide the metal into place. I didn’t care.

Disease, filth, disgust, they all came in a distant second to other priorities. I felt numb, and it wasn’t the electrocution. They’d taken away someone important to me, pushed me. My dad was gone, my lawyer, my team… my team wasn’t here.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know why they hadn’t come to the rescue, or why the mercenaries we’d hired hadn’t been called in.

I had an ugly feeling in my gut that something was wrong. Something beyond what had just happened here, beyond the possibility that someone I loved, romantically or platonically, was gone.

I got the cuffs off, set them down on a computer chair and slid it neatly under the desk so the cuffs wouldn’t be immediately apparent.

My hands were free. I needed tools and I needed weapons.

I scooped up silk cords from the floor, where they’d been abandoned by the bugs that had been working on them. Not much. Most were short, but it was something. I set my bugs to splicing them together. One twenty-foot rope was more use to me than ten cords that were each two or three feet long.

Other priorities. Those fucking drones. I could see them, footballs with one end sawn off, carried aloft by antigravity panels like the ones from Kid Win’s skateboard. I could see one switch modes, unfolding and reconfiguring to an entirely different setup, from white to red.

I used my body to block its line of sight to my swarm, trusting that it wouldn’t do any serious damage if there was a human in its line of sight, then grabbed the thing out of the air and shoved it into a desk drawer. I shut the drawer firmly before blocking it with a box of paperwork.

I’d slipped out of the pair’s grasp for just a moment. I had little doubt they’d pull some other solution out of their tinker caps before long. I crossed the room to get to a second drone, picking up a trash can from beside one desk, catching it like I might a large butterfly in a net, and then planting it on the ground, moving a monitor from someone’s desk to sit on top.

Once the way was clear, my swarm worked to catch up. Tagg’s phone wasn’t good for anything more than access until I figured out his password. A check of the phones failed to give me a dial tone. Dragon’s work?

This floor was where the PRT officers worked. It was where they got briefed and debriefed, and where they typed up their paperwork. I’d observed them at work with my bugs, had seen the patterns and figured it out in advance. I’d also seen where they kept their stuff.

Tagg’s phone and the code Defiant had used served to open the supply room. In the same moment the lock opened, Dragon turned around and made a beeline for the stairwell, using her jetpack to pick up speed. Defiant changed direction only a moment later.

She’d tapped into the security system, no doubt. Defiant would know the building’s layout if he had any of his old technology. I couldn’t give them any advantages, and if she had eyes on the security system, it would eliminate any possibility of me evading them. I set bugs to chewing on the lines that fed into the building from outside.

The boxes were locked, but I had Tagg’s keys and nothing to lose. Fully aware of Dragon and Defiant’s approach, I worked my way through the keys in much the same way I had with the keys for the cuffs.

The lights abruptly went out. After a moment, the lights came back on, with a dim red glow. The backup generator. I started to work on that as well. I could fight in darkness. I wasn’t sure they could.

I could hear them walking by the time I got the box open.

Grenade launchers, with special shells. I turned a grenade launcher over in my hands before figuring out how to open it and load the cartridges. Each was color coded, with a symbol and two-letter code stenciled on it. A green cartridge with a face, eyes squinting, mouth open with tongue extended, T.G. beneath. A red cartridge with the letters I.G. and a flame. A blue cartridge with a stick-man stuck in goop, C.F. no doubt standing for containment foam. A yellow cartridge with a lightning bolt and E.M. beneath.

I loaded the last, aiming out the open door of the storage area, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

A bar of black on the back of the grip lit up with letters, running vertically from above my thumb to the bottom of the grip. ‘NONCONFIRMED’.

They’d either learned since we attacked the fundraiser, or they took stricter measures with their more dangerous weaponry.

I investigated, but there didn’t seem to be a place to input any code.

The footsteps drew closer, heavy. I could sense Defiant with my swarm, only a short distance away, looking into the briefing room to see if he could spot me.

Fingerprints, I thought. Except there wasn’t a flat panel to press the finger against. The grip was textured, and nothing about the barrel suggested it was meant to read anything.

The gloves.

I used the same key that had opened the box to access the locker with the armor the PRT officers wore. I found a glove and began pulling it on.

Defiant appeared in the doorway. He aimed the butt of his spear at me, and the display on the gun dissipated.

He lunged, and the butt of his spear caught me just below the collarbone. With that alone, he pushed me into the lockers with enough force that they rocked against my back, rendering me pinned.

I let the grenade launcher fall to the ground.

Dragon appeared behind him, setting one hand on his arm as she passed through the door. He eased back on the pressure.

I glared at them, but they didn’t speak, and Defiant didn’t move to release me. Were they talking with one another?

“Fine,” I said. “You got me. I had to-”

Defiant was shaking his head. He tapped his mask.

Bugs flowed over the outside of his armor, and he didn’t seem to mind. There were no openings, no apertures, no air holes or gaps I could work a bug into. He was playing the same game Mannequin had, to counteract my power. Fuck it. I wouldn’t be able to sting him. Dragon either, apparently.

He couldn’t talk. I wasn’t positive he could even hear.

He shifted his grip, then grabbed my upper left arm. Dragon took hold of the right. They half-walked, half-carried me towards the stairwells and elevator. I walked more to keep them from putting more strain on my already sore shoulders than out of any need. Their grip left me little doubt they could have held me off the ground if they wanted.

Defiant stopped mid-stride, then glanced at Dragon and me.

Without letting go of me he charged the very air with a current from his spear, frying each and every one of the bugs I had in the area. It included, unfortunately, the two groups of bugs that were following me, each group discreetly escorting specialized canisters from the grenade launcher. I could feel my hair shift in reaction to the strike, the little hairs on my arms and the nape of my neck standing to attention.

I wasn’t sure if it would have worked, but my hope had been to possibly drop the grenades from overhead after we’d reached the roof. No such luck. I hung my head as we entered the stairwell, making our way up to the roof and the waiting vehicle.

This was my escort, apparently. Heroes with the tools to disable and defeat my most common methods, sealed in suits that my bugs couldn’t touch, overloaded with firepower, while I had none.

Unfair. All of it. On so many levels. Too many situations, all together, with no perfect, right answers. Over and over, being faced with lose-lose situations. Cutting ties with the Undersiders versus helping Dinah. Leaving my dad versus abandoning the people in my territory. Leaving the city versus letting the world blow up in some unknown, undefined end of the world scenario.

And maybe I could have lived with that, could have accepted that things weren’t fair and the world was biased, but I wasn’t the one paying the price. All too often, it was others around me who paid the price. My dad had suffered for my decisions before. And now? This.

Emotion was starting to creep back in. Anger, frustration, despair, heartbreak.

I blinked rapidly, to keep my eyes as dry as possible.

The anger, of all things, was comforting. It was something that pushed me to act, to move, when I wanted nothing more than to give up. I hurt everywhere, I had nobody left to rely on, and I felt drained. The fear, the hopelessness, it was seductive. It was urging me to give up.

The lights in the stairwell died as the bugs severed the output from the generator. I tried to use the surprise to pull free, but Defiant and Dragon didn’t even slow down. Their grips were firm.

I gave up when the struggling became too much of a chore with the pain in my shoulders. I still had the silk cord, if nothing else. Escape wasn’t a good option. Offense, then.

When we stepped out of the stairwell and onto the rooftop, the light momentarily blinded me. Defiant’s vessel was a mechanized dragon painted in black and green, glossy, with gold framing the shield at the dragon’s forehead, at the ‘wings’ and shoulders. The sleek form focused the light cast by the reddening sun at the horizon’s edge. It felt like the design had all been engineered to direct a hundred gleaming daggers of light right into my eyes.

To the people out there, barring those within a third of a mile who had been evacuated, this was a diversion. It was little more than something to discuss at the dinner table, or watch on the late night news. The area being evacuated, the fighting, the destruction. Even the demise of the PRT director wouldn’t have a huge impact on the average citizen of Brockton Bay. Spotting Dragon’s heavy vehicle-suit circling overhead would barely warrant twenty words in small talk. It wasn’t so noteworthy to the people down there, probably wouldn’t change the course of their weeks or evenings.

To me, this was everything. It was the rest of my life, my friends, my father. I’d lost someone. Brian or Rachel. The only people who would fit the bag. I was doing what I could to avoid dwelling on it, glad that I hadn’t yet confirmed it either way, because it let me feel like it was Rachel when I was thinking about Brian, or vice versa.

It couldn’t end like this. I didn’t want to get taken in. I had to find a way. My plan, as minor and feeble as it was, was easy enough to put into action, with him holding me like he was. My bugs moved down the length of his arm, then traveled around his midsection, twice, with the cord following them. There were only two people to tie Defiant to. Doing it to myself would be nearly useless. That left only Dragon.

I bound the other end around her left foot. The slack trailed several feet behind us. A cord as thick around as two of my fingers put together, as strong as steel.

“Before you take me in,” I said, “Could I have a word?”

Dragon turned to look at me, but didn’t speak.

“A word with Defiant,” I said. “I’m not going to try anything. He doesn’t even have to say anything. It’s sort of a last request.”

Defiant’s mask opened with a barely perceptible noise.

“A last request,” he made it a statement rather than a question. “We can talk in the Pendragon. There’s no need.”

“I spent the day in a cell, I wanted some fresh air. Sue me for thinking you actually meant something when you apologized, that you were sorry for not being fair to me back then,” I sounded more petulant and bitter than I liked.

He glanced at Dragon, and the silence suggested there was a dialogue happening.

“It’s rude to whisper,” I said. Again, more petty than I wanted to be.

“She can’t speak out loud,” Defiant said. “It’s complicated to explain. She’s under certain restrictions, many related to the PRT, and we’d agreed we didn’t want to win like that, back at the school. The only way for Dragon to stop was if I stepped in and made her stop, and she was hurt in the process. The recovery is slow.”

Only if he made her stop? Because the PRT would be harsher with her, with whatever leverage they had over her? I thought. Was that something I could use? What did they have on her that they didn’t have on the hero-on-probation?

“Thank you,” I said, to Dragon. “For doing that.”

She gave me a curt nod in response.

“I’ve been trying to grow as a person, with Dragon’s help,” Defiant said. “I’m willing to listen, but it’ll have to be fast.”

“Okay,” I said. I glanced at Dragon. I almost hated to do this, but I’d already started, and I couldn’t go to jail. Not with things as they stood. “Can I talk to him in private?”

Defiant and Dragon exchanged a look. He nodded once, and she took flight, heading towards her airborne vehicle-suit.

The cord went taut, and Defiant’s grip on my arm was wrenched away as he was dragged back. Heavy as he was, Dragon’s jet was powerful, and he wasn’t on his guard. It took him seconds to realize what was happening, to get his footing and shift his center of balance lower to the ground.

I was already moving, chasing him. There was no point to trying to escape if they were right on my heels.

He came to a stop at the edge of the roof, but I was already arriving, taking advantage of his lack of balance to throw myself into his upper body.

Not the first time I’ve fought a dragon-man on a rooftop, I thought, as I felt Defiant move in response, all of his sturdiness and armor nothing with a strong push at the right moment. One to mark the start of my career in costume, the other to mark the end?

If he’d had a mind to, he could have grabbed me and taken me down with him. Maybe Armsmaster would have.

But Defiant twisted as he tilted backwards, drawing his folded-up spear and striking out in the same motion. It bit into the concrete of the rooftop’s edge, the head expanding for a more secure grip.

I kicked the spear, as if I could dislodge it, but only succeeded in hurting my foot.

Dragon caught me a moment later, pushing me away. She offered Defiant a hand, and he used both her grip and the spear to right himself, pulling himself back from the edge.

He stepped forward and gripped me by the front of my oversized prison-uniform t-shirt. “Stop that.”

I only glared.

“Stop trying things,” he repeated, as if he thought repetition would get through more than articulation.

“Fuck you,” I said. I didn’t like how I sounded. The guise of confidence I was so used to wearing was slipping away. “Fuck you and the people you work for.”

“I don’t know why I-” he said, then he stopped abruptly. Was Dragon interrupting?

“You bastards,” I said. I could feel the veneer starting to crack. The tears that had threatened earlier were now promising to overflow.

“You don’t have any conception of what you did, do you?” he asked.

“I have some,” I said. “But no, you assholes knocked me out. I don’t know anything that’s been going on. I attacked Tagg and Alexandria-”

“They’re dead,” Defiant said.

Dead. I hadn’t believed Alexandria would die like that. She’d flown away. Surely there were methods.

“A family man-”

“A bully,” I said. “Twisted by the Simurgh, probably-”

“He was vetted,” Defiant said. “But he’s not important. You killed one of the strongest recognized heroes in the world, at a time we needed her most. Her image, her courage, her help. Do you know what’s going to happen, now?”

“I do,” I said. “It’s going to crush the morale of our defending forces, and it’s going to break the hearts of billions of people around the world. I knew it when I made the call, but I did it anyways.”

“And you doomed us all.”

“She doomed us all. She was the one who did it, her and Tagg.”

“Maybe. Probably. They forced your hand. I understand that, and I’ve been trying to be lenient. Gentle, even, though it’s not familiar to me.” His tone changed, “You’re making it hard, you keep trying things. Trying to kill me.”

“You would have survived,” I said. “A six-story fall in armor like yours? I could have run while Dragon looked after you. Gotten my hands on another weapon or something.”

He didn’t answer right away, but there was nothing indicating an exchange between him and Dragon. His voice was tight with restrained anger when he said, “You could make this easier.”

“I don’t want to make this easy,” I said. “As long as you work for them, I’m going to fight you. You want to know what Alexandria did? She and Tagg convinced me that the PRT is more trouble than it’s worth. If we have to rely on them to win this, then we don’t deserve to win.”

“That’s a choice you just made for a whole planet of people,” Defiant said.

“A choice I’m making for me. I think we can find a way past the end of the world, it can’t be impossible to survive the meantime without the PRT.”

“This isn’t going to work.”

The voice was female, and it came from Dragon’s direction.

“I’m having my doubts as well,” Defiant said.

“We’re low on options,” the voice sounded. It wasn’t Dragon, but someone communicating through a speaker on her shoulder. I recognized the voice. Miss Militia.

“Where is she?” I asked.

Defiant pointed at Dragon’s airborne craft.

“You’re not just here to arrest me?” I asked.

“No,” Defiant said. “Or we weren’t, until you decided to try to push me off a building. Now I’m reconsidering.”

“Tell her the plan,” Miss Militia said, through the speaker, “We don’t have any more time, for reconsidering or anything else.”

Time?

I glanced over my shoulder at the sun on the horizon. It was still twenty or thirty minutes from sunset. I must have been out for an hour or so.

But… the deadline didn’t matter anymore, did it? The Undersiders should be attacking already, after being attacked, it was almost inevitable, if Grue or Rachel…

I shook my head. “No. No, no, no. No.”

“Skitter-”

Too many things that hadn’t made sense.

The fact that the Undersiders hadn’t gone on the offensive, or rescued me here after the PRT left me in my cell.

Alexandria keeping to her schedule, the little clues she’d given, like reminding me she could be drowned. The baiting, the pressure, even from the moment Tagg was introduced.

Even the way she’d avoided stopping Coil, avoided stopping us. The way she hadn’t stepped in against the Nine, or against Echidna, at first. There had been something bigger going on.

“Why? For what?” I asked. “A ruse? Playing me?”

“Yes. With one tragic mistake that we’re all about to pay for.”

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Cell 22.4

Posted on May 11, 2013 by wildbow

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I watched my dad’s expression change. “I don’t understand.”

“Like I said,” Tagg said, “Peace of mind.”

“Let’s get started,” Alexandria said. “I believe I’m fully up to speed, unless Director Tagg has agreed to any deals or made any concessions.”

“Sadly, he hasn’t,” my lawyer said.

“This is common knowledge?” my dad murmured to me.

“Since roughly ten days ago,” I said, not taking my eyes off the woman. She was looking at me like Tattletale sometimes did. It made me distinctly uncomfortable.

“Let’s not make this the focus of our discussion. You wanted to be on board, I presume. You had to be informed, so you understood exactly what it means when I make a threat.”

“You’re planning to make threats?” I asked.

“Threats is the wrong word,” she said. “But English is a limited language in some ways. There’s really no word to articulate what I mean. A threat with a measure of inevitability to it. A promise? Too feeble. People break promises too often. A curse? A malediction? Too… magical. An oath? The connotations are wrong. When I say I’ll do something, I make it happen.”

I didn’t respond. Mr. Calle did. “You seem rather confident.”

“Overconfident? I imagine I seem that way. It doesn’t matter.”

I studied her, “When you say you’re going to do something? What is it you’re doing?”

“Putting an end to this nonsense, for one thing. The PRT, flawed as it is, is my legacy, and I truly believe that it saves lives, or I wouldn’t try to protect it.”

“I’m trying to protect it,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “But the timing is wrong. Things are too fragile at this moment. It won’t do. We’ll arrange this discussion for another time, weeks or months from now, when things have stabilized.”

“I… don’t think it works that way,” I said.

“It does. Truth be told, I’ve relinquished all authority. I’m serving under the new Chief Director, and I’m carrying out his instructions, between the times where I’m instructing him in the particulars of his job. Alexandria, however, remains with the Protectorate, having given her notice that she quits within the week. She’ll continue as a solo operative.”

An operative for Cauldron, I thought. I didn’t say it aloud. Best to let her dictate what information was acceptable to mention aloud. And she refers to her costumed self as someone else entirely.

I could see the confusion in my father’s face, the dawning realization of how far in over his head he was.

“So you’re following orders,” I said. “That’s the worst and scariest excuse in the world, really.”

“It’s a reality,” she said. “When you’re dealing with organizations as big as these.”

“And it’s also a reality that you’ll have people at the top who don’t understand how things work on the ground, giving orders that don’t jibe with reality.”

“You’d be surprised at what I’m capable of understanding,” Alexandria told me.

“You’re forgetting about the Undersiders.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t forget anything. Your team is now my bargaining chip.”

I narrowed my eyes. “How’s that?”

“It’s twenty minutes to six. I’m not in a particular rush, and I actually enjoy the idea of some field work. We can talk for five minutes, and then have ‘Alexandria’ remove one of your teammates from the field. Depending on the situation, I will either arrest them and take them to PRT offices in New York and Boston, or I’ll kill them.”

I could feel my blood run cold.

“After, we can talk for another five or ten minutes, and then I will, again, depart to dispatch one of your teammates. I expect that by the time the sun sets at eight thirty, the Undersiders will be either dealt with or so neutered that they aren’t a consideration.”

“You’re talking about killing teenagers,” my dad said. “Without a trial?”

“I’m talking about self-defense, if it comes down to it. Tattletale can see through weaknesses. I can’t imagine that she’d be able to leverage mine in the spur of the moment, but I won’t rule anything out.”

I stared at her. “You’re willing to go this far, yet you couldn’t bring yourself to show up to fight the Slaughterhouse Nine. Or Echidna, when she first showed.”

“There were extenuating circumstances.”

“Tattletale, you mean.”

“No. Tattletale was only a small part of it,” she said. “And it should be obvious that the rest isn’t up for discussion. Three minutes and forty-five seconds. Negotiate.”

“You mean you want me to make concessions.”

“I’m saying I’m willing to hear you out. Convince me.”

“You’re underestimating my team.”

“And now you’re referring to them as ‘your team’. I thought you left. You committed to this idea of yours, did you not?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do. But as much as I may be underestimating them, I find that others underestimate me. Strength, durability, flight. It doesn’t lend itself to much imagination, does it? Yet others acknowledge me as one of the strongest heroes in the world. ‘Cape geeks’ debate my effectiveness, protesting that I’m only seen as powerful by association with Legend and Eidolon. Do feel free to interrupt me if you want to talk about more concrete things.”

I would have, if I could have thought of something to say.

“My reputation isn’t so different from yours, Taylor Hebert. It’s a reputation that was forged. There have been fifty-six Endbringer attacks in the last nineteen years. I have personally participated in forty-nine of them, and in each fight I’ve attended, I’ve been in the thick of the fighting, personally trading blows with the abominations. The creatures know me. They know how to fight me, and I know how to fight them. Yet I’m still here. Strength, invulnerability, flight. Those are my core powers, but my other power is greater.”

“Other power?” my dad asked. “I remember. When you started off… you explained the reason for your name.”

“A reference to the burned library of Alexandria. It’s been mythologized as that era’s sum of human knowledge. I am much the same. I think faster, I think more easily. I know martial arts and I remember everything that crosses my path.”

Miss Militia reacted to that, giving Alexandria a look I couldn’t interpret.

She went on. “I would say I am one of three or four people in this world who truly understands what is going on. I don’t have all of the answers, and there are some riddles in particular that we’re desperately seeking to unravel.”

“We, of course, being…” I said, trailing off. It wasn’t a question. Something about the gravity of the word made my dad look at me, startled.

“I won’t discuss the others. I’ve been disconnected from my former partners, so it’s a moot point. A debatable point, to use the true meaning of the word.”

I saw a possible piece of leverage and grasped for it, “If you need answers, then we’re the last people you should be attacking. Tattletale can offer input. Leave the Undersiders in place, and they can work with you where necessary. Treat me fairly, and I’m sure Tattletale will play ball.”

“There’s two problems with that offer,” Alexandria said. She stood from her seat and adjusted her suit jacket, then turned her attention to her cuffs. “First of all, I believe I mentioned that there’s only a small number of people who truly understand what’s going on. We haven’t shared this information. Why?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“This isn’t a riddle. It’s quite simple: we don’t want people to know. And we don’t want people to know for good reason. Having Tattletale off leash with all of the information she might discover is a dangerous prospect.”

“She’s not that unpredictable.”

“But it’s not a variable we can afford to have in play. As I’ve said, things are fragile. Which brings me to my second point. There’s no reason to leave her here if we can bring her into custody and use her freedom or probationary freedom as leverage to obtain her talents.”

I frowned.

Alexandria glanced at Tagg, “It’s time. Five forty-five. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

Ten minutes.

She was at the door, waiting for the guard to open it, when I called out, “Tattletale won’t listen. She’s too rebellious, wants to be the smartest person in the room. If you force her, she’ll sabotage you, or she’ll just make you put her in the Birdcage, having her here, it’s the only way to get her help.”

Alexandria paused, then looked back at me. “That will do. Information I can use, that changes how I’ll respond to this particular confrontation. I don’t agree, but we can discuss that after. I’ll target one of the others in the meantime.”

The metal door slammed shut.

Miss Militia stood. “I need some fresh air.”

She didn’t ask for permission, and she didn’t even look at anyone as she made her way to the door and knocked for the PRT guard to let her through.

“Everything she was talking about,” my dad said, “I can’t wrap my head around this.”

“This is what I’ve been living,” I said. “This has been my day-to-day. My friends and I, facing terminal risk, facing down monsters like her, like Alexandria.”

“She’s one of the heroes.”

“Yeah,” I said, meeting my dad’s eyes. It hadn’t been so long ago that I’d been able to cling to that basic idea. The image, as I’d heard it phrased, of the heroes, of the Triumvirate. It had been Armsmaster who instilled the seed of doubt in me, as far as the heroes went. “Do you think she’s that heroic, now that you’ve met her in person?”

“No,” he said. He looked troubled.

Shit. I was stuck in a box while one of the scariest heroes around was going after my friends. I’d expected retaliation, had told Tattletale to expect it, but this was… I hadn’t expected Alexandria. She wasn’t even supposed to be with the PRT. Eidolon, we possibly could have dealt with. Or Tattletale could have. Even Legend, possibly. Alexandria was something else. The heroic equivalent of a cruise missile.

There was Grue’s power, Imp’s power… did Alexandria have the ability to see through it?

Alexandria was taking her time. She’d said ten minutes, but she wasn’t in a hurry, making her way out of the building.

“You know, now,” I said. “After the Echidna incident-”

I could see Tagg stiffen, kept talking, “-Stuff went down. Alexandria was outed as head of the PRT, other secrets came to light. You know the PRT is supposed to be led by non-capes, there was scandal, and now the PRT is falling apart.”

“I see,” my dad said. “Other secrets?”

“You don’t want to know,” I said. “And Tagg would be exceedingly upset if I shared.”

My dad frowned and stared down at the table. “I believe you.”

I nodded.

Alexandria had found an alley and promptly took to the air, zig-zagging between buildings and flying with enough speed that people couldn’t follow her with their eyes.

“My phone isn’t working,” Mr. Calle said.

“Can’t have you warning them,” Tagg replied.

“I’m offended at the implication,” Mr. Calle said.

“Can’t have her warning them either,” Tagg replied.

Warning them. I needed a way to contact my team. Cells wouldn’t work. A land line? An unoccupied office… Tagg’s office would do. My bugs made their way there.

Too small to affect anything, to press a key on the computer, even if I could see the screen. Too small to transmit a message of any sort.

I needed a larger bug. There were larger beetles and cockroaches outside. Everything else had been wiped out by Kid Win’s drones.

I could see Mr. Calle and Tagg watching my dad and I, looking between us. “What?”

Mr. Calle answered, “I’ve represented a lot of supervillains. I can count on one hand the ones who had parents show up at their trial, let alone pre-trial. When they did show up, half of them were a nightmare. Bambina’s mother, for example, all of the worst aspects of a showbiz parent, but the kid’s a vandal and a mass murderer. Don’t even get me started on how toxic that dynamic was. You two are civil with one another, at the very least. That’s… something. Hold onto it.”

“Hold onto it?” Tagg commented, from the opposite end of the table. “I think you’re forgetting your client’s circumstances.”

Again, interjecting himself in between my dad and I. Driving in wedges. I felt a momentary urge to do something painful to him.

I couldn’t rise to the bait, though. I had to channel the anger. Bugs were finding their way through vents and down hallways, spreading out so the two or three remaining drones couldn’t eradicate them.

Others clustered on Tagg’s phone. Silk allowed multiple bugs to effectively ‘grip’ the phone handle. Larger bugs found their way under the base of it, wedging their bodies beneath as the pull on the cord tilted it. A little bit of progress, driving in the wedge to make sure the phone didn’t simply fall back into place.

“You’re going to jail, Skitter,” Tagg said. “And if you’re very, very lucky, it won’t be the Birdcage or a death sentence.”

“She’s a minor,” my dad said.

“Doesn’t matter,” Mr. Calle sighed.

“Look at me, Tagg,” I said. “You said you weren’t going to underestimate me. Do you really think I’m worried? Do you think I would have surrendered if I didn’t have confidence that I’d be able to manage?”

My dad was staring at me.

“No,” he said. “I think you have a number of plans in the works. But it doesn’t matter. Alexandria can out-think your plans, counter anything your Tattletale throws at us.

His phone handset fell from its perch, clattering across the keys before it fell from the desk, swinging. I could see the flare of light on the phone, marking that the line was active. I hoped there wasn’t a secretary who’d notice.

I flew the largest beetle I had into the number pad, driving him into the number five. The bugs on the mouthpiece heard a sound I took to be the answering beep.

Five again. Second number in the sequence.

Not hard enough. No beep.

Five again.

Seven numbers.

The message that came through was odd, rhythmic somehow, though I couldn’t make out the words. A recording.

I had to dial an outside line.

Eight numbers this time, starting with… Nine. It took a full minute to hit the buttons.

Nothing.

Eight numbers starting with eight… No.

Seven.

The call went through. I got a response.

Please be Lisa.

I tried buzzing out words. It didn’t feel like enough.

So I retired the abused beetle and set to using cockroaches. My bugs felt the indents of the characters on the number pad.

Two, five, three, nine, two, six…

The voice interrupted me.

The number of syllables was right. She understood. The numbers each corresponded to three possible letters, and each number pressed on the phone generated a different sound. Anyone else might have struggled, but Tattletale picked up on it right away. ‘Alexandria’.

I could only hope it helped. A little forewarning, at best.

Still couldn’t make out words that followed. The filter of both the phone and my bugs was too much, and I couldn’t begin to guess where the speaker phone button was. Wasn’t sure I wanted to risk using it in case someone stepped into the office. A phone being off the hook was far better than a voice talking to nothing.

“You meant it, when you said they were your friends,” my dad said.

“We’ve been through thick and thin. They saved me, in some ways. I’d like to think I saved them.”

Tagg snorted. I ignored him.

“They did… bad things, didn’t they?” my dad asked.

“So have I,” I said.

“But you’re willing to martyr yourself for them?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t come here to be a martyr, I had other hopes. But… things didn’t work out like that. It’s down to secondary goals… and if those fail, then I’m willing to go to jail for their sakes. Not just my friends. The people in my territory, and maybe just a little, everyone.”

I looked at Tagg as I said that last word. He gave me a dirty look, then more or less turned his attention to his phone, watching me with one eye while texting with one hand.

“Everyone?” my dad asked.

“We can’t lose the next Endbringer fight,” was all I could say.

“No, I don’t imagine we can,” he said.

That was something he understood in full, even if he didn’t know the particulars. The Endbringers were something we all understood. A fact of reality, something that touched everyone, struck a chord of fear in cape and civilian alike.

My heart sank as Alexandria appeared. She plunged past the cloud of bugs that had collected over the roof, into an opening aperture in the ceiling. She passed down a shaft that ran parallel to the elevator, and into the Wards’ quarters.

From there, she reached the elevator and made her way up to the cells.

Alexandria rejoined us in the cell, virtually the same, though her hair was disheveled, her suit jacket folded over one arm. She laid it across the back of Miss Militia’s empty chair and stayed there, leaning on the back of the chair that was bolted to the floor.

Noting Miss Militia’s absence led to me double checking on her. She was on the roof. No, I couldn’t count on anything from her. I’d hoped to have one more piece in play, but she was leaning over a railing at the edge of a helicopter landing pad, staring out over the city.

Alexandria had to be my focus. She was staring at me, scrutinizing me. I met her eyes, and she locked hers onto mine.

“I’d thought Tattletale had figured it out…” she paused, “But no. You told them. You have an open line of communication with them.”

I shrugged, thinking of Tagg’s phone, with the handset still dangling over the edge of the desk.

Wished I could hear her response. What had happened to my teammates?

“Let’s take five minutes more to talk. Then I’ll take care of another of the Undersiders.”

“Another?”

“A PRT van will be along shortly. I wanted to keep to my time commitment, so I sent a truck.”

“Why should I say anything?” I asked her.

“Because as long as we’re talking, I’m not out there, taking your team to pieces, and you have a shot at passing them information. It gives them time to recuperate and strategize. Five minutes gives them time to make a getaway, or contact help. I imagine you arranged for backup. Hired mercenaries to help break you out if this went badly enough that you faced jail without getting anything you wanted or needed.”

I set my jaw.

“I know the general value of the properties you acquired, the proposed value of it. Your team would spend it. Ninety two million dollars, spent on hired soldiers, hired parahumans. That’s only your liquid assets.”

I didn’t reply. I set to typing the next message on Tagg’s phone. K-N-O-W-S-A-B-O-U-T-M-E-R-C-S

She straightened, removing her hands from the back of the chair. “If you’re not going to say anything, I might as well go now. You’re rather partial to Grue, aren’t you? Or should I take Tattletale out of the picture?”

“We can talk,” I told her.

“Excellent,” she said. She stepped around the corner of the table and sat in her chair, opposite me. “Do you need anything? Water? Coffee? Soda?”

I shook my head.

“Mr. Calle? Mr. Hebert?”

Two refusals.

She removed her phone from her jacket pocket. “Forgive me for using this in the midst of our discussion. Chevalier is likely to become the head of the Protectorate once the Triumvirate has departed, and he’s insisting that I keep tabs with him, what with the scandal and all. I’d show you, but that would be a breach of confidence.”

She smiled, as though at a private joke. The smile didn’t matter to me. It was the way her eyes didn’t leave me.

“You’re cold reading me,” I said.

“Cold reading?” My dad asked.

“Tattletale does it too. Mixes details she knows with ones she doesn’t, with very careful wording and a bit of an edge with her thinker powers.”

“Mm hmm,” Alexandria said. She typed expertly on her phone, almost absently. “I know you’ve probably got someone in the lobby or outside, receiving coded messages. I know about the mercenaries. More mercenaries than I implied. I expect Tattletale called in favors. Probably not the Irregulars, but I didn’t read that. Simple logic. They wouldn’t work for you. I know that you’re still feeling confident, but not entirely so. If you were very close to breaking or very, very confident, you would have accepted my offer of a drink. And I know that your bugs can’t see computer screens.”

Was she bluffing on that last part? Did it matter if she was? I could refuse, play some kind of trick, and she’d see right through it.

“I could make some noise about my client’s rights being trampled, a lack of consent to that kind of analysis,” Mr. Calle said.

“But you know the law doesn’t apply here. We’re in a gray area, up until the moment we decide to press charges and set this into motion, or you decide to force the issue. But neither of us want that. For now, this is… somewhere between her being in our custody and us having a friendly chat.”

My lawyer glanced at me. I frowned. “Yeah. So long as she doesn’t start grilling me.”

“As you wish,” Mr. Calle said.

My head turned as I sensed the truck arriving. Bugs clustered to it as it found a spot at the side of the building, PRT uniforms moving their target on a stretcher. My bugs shifted position, tracking what they were moving. The white mask, the curls, the shirt, with a tightly woven fabric beneath… a spider silk shirt? It was Regent, unconscious.

The bugs moved, tracing down the length of his arm. It was broken in two places, virtually zig-zagging. His leg was the same. I caught the words ‘medical’ and ‘doctor’. ‘Tranquilizer’.

“He’s arrived, I take it.” Alexandria said.

I nodded tightly.

“The paradigm has changed,” Alexandria said. “In… two minutes and thirty seconds, I go and dispatch another of your teammates. I’ll hear concessions, offers or relevant information, and I’ll adjust my methods and the severity of my attack where appropriate.”

“This is extortion,” my dad said.

“She makes the process easier for us, we make it easier on her and her friends.”

I frowned. “That’s still extortion.”

“Two minutes and eight seconds,” she said, not even bothering to deny it. She had the same habit as Tattletale, of knowing the time without looking at a clock. “They’re going to be running, now, trying to throw me off their trail. I’ll find them. I can study the environment, I’ve studied the case histories and I know where they own property.”

Another alert I needed to give. I was still typing in the last one. The cockroaches weren’t strong enough to hit the keys with enough force, so it was more of a case of having to leverage the key down through the combined efforts of several larger roaches and carefully arranged silk.

I grit my teeth, trying to focus on the spelling while keeping track of what Alexandria was saying. Started on the next message. X-K-N-O-W-S-P-R-O-P-E-R-T-I-E-S

“You’re backing me into a corner,” I said. “Backing them into a corner. Someone’s bound to snap.”

“Most likely,” she said, and there wasn’t a trace of concern in her expression. It was almost eerie, how little she seemed to care. Was that her passenger at work, or was she simply good enough at what she did, comfortable enough in her invincibility, that she’d grown able to shrug off the insignificant things?

I shook my head. “I’m not making concessions. The terms I gave still stand. If you want to discuss the reasons behind-”

She was already getting out of her chair.

“-behind why I made the demands I made, we can. I think you’ll find it reasonable.”

“I’ve heard this,” Alexandria said. She donned her suit jacket, buttoning it up in front. “Read it, rather. I’ve thought about all the permutations and unless you’re willing to change tack or tell me something I don’t know, there’s no point to this discussion.”

She walked to the door and knocked. While waiting for the officer to open the door, she turned, “One last chance to offer me something. Any detail I can use, things to watch out for.”

Bitch, I thought. Her power, it screwed with her head. She can’t relate to people. She doesn’t understand facial expressions, body language or our social constructs. It’s all replaced by dog behavior.

Grue. Post traumatic stress. He doesn’t like doctors, doesn’t like being confined, or the dark. But he’s stable otherwise.

Information that could be used to protect Bitch, protect Grue. To keep a bad situation from getting worse. It felt like it would be a betrayal anyways. It was an eerie reversal of the rationalization I’d done back at the bank robbery, on my first job as a villain. Telling myself that terrorizing the hostages was for their own good.

But I couldn’t bring myself to betray them on that level. Not to people who trusted me.

And she was gone.

I grit my teeth. I looked at Calle, but he shook his head.

Tagg reached for his phone, where it sat on the table.

Long minutes passed, as Tagg texted and I sat in anxious silence.

“You said you’ve worked with cape families,” my dad spoke. It took me a second to realize he was talking to Calle.

“Yes,” my lawyer answered.

“Can I ask you some questions?”

“I was just about to step outside, call some colleagues.”

“Oh.”

“After. Unless you want to join me?”

“Isn’t it better if she isn’t alone?”

“Everything’s recorded. Short of her being threatened with serious bodily injury or death, I don’t see a problem.”

My dad cast me a look. I nodded.

He left with Mr. Calle.

“You and I,” Tagg said.

I folded my arms as best as I was able, then leaned forward to rest my head. Not worth giving him the benefit of a conversation.

The table shook, and I briefly looked up, only to see Tagg setting his feet on the metal surface.

He took his time getting comfortable, and kicked the table several times in the process.

When I set my head down, he started humming.

He’s trying to get to me, I thought to myself, for the Nth time.

They were bullies. Tagg and Alexandria both. They were the equivalent of the older child picking on the kindergartener, or the adult picking on the child. They had power to throw around that I didn’t, they had freedom, liberty, the power of choice. They wanted to punish me, to put me off-balance for their own ends.

Just… bullies in a grander scale.

I simultaneously felt like I understood Tagg a little more, and a little less.

Mr. Calle answered a ton of my father’s questions, big and small. About things I’d thought were common knowledge, like trigger events, and more specific, grave matters, like the prospect of my receiving the death penalty. When he’d exhausted each of those questions, he asked about other things. Smarter things, like the degree to which he might be able to stand up to Alexandria or Tagg, about how he could work with Calle to throw them off-balance, and signals to arrange a plan of attack.

My dad, entirely out of place, out of his depth, confused and utterly unarmed, fighting to get up to speed, in the hopes that he could do something to help.

It was a step forward. A small step, but a step forward.

Tagg stood, approaching me, then leaned on the table just beside me, so he loomed over me, not speaking, invading my personal space, denying me the ability to rest or relax.

And my bugs, in his office, continued punching away as best as they were able. Me, communicating with Tattletale, unable to hear her response, straining to hear some sign of the violence. Had they split up?

Regent’s arms and legs had been set, and he lay on a bed identical to the one I’d had, apparently tranquilized.

I was the target, the mastermind, the one they were trying to break.

Alexandria only took six minutes. She arrived by the same route, only she held a girl this time. A hard mask with horns and slanted lenses that tapered into points at the corners, a skin-tight bodysuit. Imp.

Alexandria had found a way around Imp’s power. Or her mental powers had overridden them.

One more body in the cells. One more Undersider down.

Alexandria found her way back to the cells before my dad and my lawyer did, accompanied by Miss Militia. Alexandria grabbed one of Kid Win’s active drones from the air and tucked it under one arm like a football as she made her way down, and held it up as she visited the cell where they were checking an unconscious, tranquilized Imp. Every bug was eradicated by the mist that appeared, leaving me utterly blind.

I didn’t see her again until she opened the door and joined us. She was drenched, her hair soaked, swept back away from her face, and the makeup that had hidden the seam of her prosthetic eye had been washed away, leaving a conspicuous line in place. Miss Militia looked grim and very dry beside her.

“They fought back?” I asked.

“A firehose, and a cape with a water geyser power. They tried to drown me. It didn’t work. Others have tried the same thing, in many different variations. Old hat.”

A cape with water generating powers? The Ambassadors.

She looked around, “Your lawyer?”

“Out,” Tagg said, not looking up from his phone.

“I suppose it would be bad manners to talk to you while he’s occupied,” Alexandria said.

I didn’t reply.

“Well, five minutes before I go again. If this is a delaying tactic, it won’t work.”

“Read my face,” I said, “It’s not a delaying tactic.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m keeping to a schedule. Roughly half an hour at a time, collecting one Undersider with each excursion. I told you I’d hold off on collecting Tattletale, so I’ll save her for last. Four minutes and forty seconds.”

Tattletale was still periodically speaking into the phone, while I typed out letters. She’d stopped talking as much when I’d typed out a few words to let her know I couldn’t understand. No, her focus right now would be on arranging her remaining forces, handling what she could, dealing with Alexandria.

“I’d like to stay,” Alexandria said. “May I sit?”

“If you want,” I said. I gestured towards the chair, best as I was able with the cuffs.

“Excellent. So cooperative.” She sat down. “And we can talk?”

I nodded mutely.

Alexandria, a bully, believing herself untouchable. I felt a grim sort of loathing stirring in the depths of my gut.

“My terms, to you. You surrender. The Undersiders receive no amnesty, but I let captives go, with all required medical care. They fend for themselves from here on out. Tagg remains in position. He’s here for a reason. Miss Militia is promoted elsewhere. With the fall of the Triumvirate, we need a new core group. We can market it.”

“That’s not what I wanted.”

“It’s what I’m offering. And you… provided you cooperate fully, giving us all the information we desire on you, your histories, and the Undersiders, we put you in juvenile detention. Two years, followed by a long probation and acknowledgement that any conceivable violation of that probation will be counted as a third strike and cause for sentencing to the Birdcage.”

My dad and lawyer were just arriving.

“What’s this?” Mr. Calle asked.

“Skitter’s hearing my revised terms,” Alexandria said.

“And?” Mr. Calle asked.

“They want me to turn myself in. I get virtually nothing, except the prompt release of the Undersiders she’s picked up and a stay in juvenile detention until I’m eighteen.”

I could see my dad’s eyes light up. He saw this as a way out, when he was seeing just how deep we were in the midst of this.

Which broke my heart, in a way.

“And your thoughts?” Mr. Calle asked.

“No,” I said. I looked at Alexandria. “No.”

“This isn’t the sort of offer that stays on the table,” she said. “If you want to push this further, we could keep the Undersiders.”

“You need the Undersiders,” I told her. “You need someone on the ground, keeping the real monsters out of the city. You need us, so don’t pretend you’re really going to keep them.”

“There’s other options,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, “Because even if there wasn’t that security, no.”

“That’s a disappointment,” she said.

“You wanted compromise, Skitter,” Miss Militia said, “But you’re asking for the impossible.”

“I’m asking for the improbable,” I said. “But it wouldn’t be worth fighting for if it was easy. Alexandria isn’t asking me to meet her halfway. She’s threatening people I love.”

“From teammates to friends to people you love.”

I grit my teeth.

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “I loved Hero. I loved Legend, and Eidolon, and Myrddin. I know what it means to pass through hell together, to take a desperate breath for air, to clutch for clarity of mind, and help each other find the briefest of respite in the little things, only to plunge into that hell once more. The little jokes, the familiarity, the gestures and small kindnesses, they count for a lot, when you’ve been through what we’ve been through-”

“Don’t compare us,” I cut in.

“-and you learn to look past their faults. The little evils,” she said. “And they learn to look past yours.”

Miss Militia gave Alexandria a curious look, then turned to me, “The offer, it’s the most reasonable one we can give you. It’s generous, considering all you’ve done.”

“It’s not enough,” I said. “Until my team has amnesty, I can’t back down. I can’t abandon them to fight lunatics like Tagg and Alexandria the second I’m gone.”

“That’s what you want?” Alexandria asked. “Amnesty, release for captured teammates, and a sentence to juvenile detention?”

My dad reached out, taking my hand, a silent plea. Saying everything without doing me the disservice of interjecting.

It wasn’t enough, but it was something. I could trust my teammates to hold their own. I could… I could find my way. Two years made for such a small length of time. It… it would mean I was in custody when Dinah’s deadline came. But maybe that was what she’d wanted. For me to be somewhere secure when it all started. I couldn’t rule it out.

And all it would take was for me to do what I’d done for so long before I had my powers, for months after I’d had my powers. To capitulate, to let go of my pride. To let them win, those people who wanted to use their power, their prestige and superiority against me.

My dad squeezed my hand, hard.

“I named my terms,” I told Alexandria. “I trust my teammates, and I trust that they’ll win where it counts. No.”

I met Tagg’s eyes, and my voice was a growl, “And if you fucking hurt another hair on their heads, I’ll see you pay for it. Like Lung, like Valefor, and if it comes down to it, I’ll come after you like I did with Butcher, and Coil- Calvert.”

I directed my glare at Alexandria as I said that last part.

“You’re admitting-” Miss Militia started.

“Let’s not pretend we don’t all know,” I said.

I felt my dad’s hand drop away from mine. I might have met his eyes, to take in the hurt and the pain that came with seeing who I really was, but I wasn’t willing to break eye contact with Alexandria.

You can read facial expressions? Read this. Know I’m telling the truth. Know that I’ll take you apart, given the slightest excuse.

I was pressing the keys on the telephone before Alexandria had even stood from her seat. Another warning that Alexandria was en route.

She stood, wordless. There was no negotiation, no offer for leniency, and I didn’t ask for either.

I could only hope.

In a matter of minutes, she was gone, flying away. A third mission. A third hunt.

Bugs found their way through vents to Regent, but Imp’s cell was sealed tight, no doubt due to the Stranger-class precautions that had led to the note being pasted on her cell door, notifying the PRT of the special precautions. It didn’t matter. Regent was still unconscious, and Imp was likely to be as well.

Grue, Rachel, Tattletale and Parian. Flechette too, if it came down to it.

Flechette… could she hurt Alexandria?

It didn’t matter. I didn’t have answers, couldn’t get them. I could only wait, keeping my bugs out of the way of the drones that Kid Win had finally recharged.

“You had a way out,” Miss Militia said.

“You said you understand me,” I told her. “That you had insight into who I was as a person, now that you knew my history. If that’s true, you understand why I had to say no.”

“For your sake. Because of what you’ve been through.”

“And because of them. They’d never forgive me if I betrayed everything they helped me become, because I didn’t think they could fend for themselves.”

“And me?” my dad asked. “I know it’s asking a lot. I failed you where it counted.”

“Dad-”

“And maybe it’s selfish, to want my daughter, when you’re talking about things on this scale…” he said, pausing as if he was going to follow that with an argument. But no argument followed.

And I couldn’t give him a good response.

Eight minutes passed. I could count the progression of time on the clock hands, when I dared let a bug pass through open spaces.

Nine minutes in, I could see Tagg suddenly tense, lines in his neck standing out as he read the newest message on his phone. He glanced at me, but he didn’t say anything and I didn’t ask.

The PRT van arrived before Alexandria did, this time. The PRT officers took their time before they finally emerged.

Restless, I shifted position. My forearms were digging into the table where the cuffs held my arms in front of me. Leaning forward made my back hurt.

They opened the back of the van, and there were no precautions this time. Their weapons were holstered, and they didn’t stand in any particular formation.

The only thing in the back was a single body bag.

Back pain forgotten, I went as stiff as Tagg. I drew more bugs in to get a better picture of the scene.

They took a different route this time, using their phones to make their way through the various doors and checkpoints. They entered the attached building. A small hospital, or a special office with medical facilities. It didn’t matter.

And they made their way to the morgue.

The size of the bag… it couldn’t be Lizardtail. He was too large. Was the wrong size and shape to be one of the dogs. That left only three real possibilities. A PRT officer, Rachel, or Brian.

I closed my eyes, clenched my hands.

Then one of the PRT officers who was escorting the body said something, and others laughed in response. It was one of those rare moments I could discern tone, and it wasn’t a kind one. That was enough for me to know it wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t a civilian.

Metal clicked as they unlocked the heavy clasps and locks that were likely meant to prevent any parahumans from getting up from the dead.

They unzipped the bag, and lifted the body onto the drawer. The drawer slid into the recess, the lid was closed and locked.

I didn’t want to know which of them it was. I couldn’t. Whether it was Brian or Rachel, it didn’t matter. Neither of them would get up from the dead. They weren’t so lucky.

I stared down at my hands, and I felt myself go cold, my thoughts crystal clear, singular.

“Taylor,” my dad murmured, so quiet I could barely hear him.

“Yes?”

I sounded so calm, like an entirely different person was speaking.

“You’re shaking,” he whispered.

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t really think of anything else to say. He was right. My fingers were trembling.

I looked at Tagg, to see if he’d heard or if he’d noticed. No indication, but his hand was close to his gun. The text he’d read… he knew. He probably wasn’t aware he was doing it, but he was ready for a fight to erupt any second.

Miss Militia’s hand wasn’t, but I could read a tension in her, as she exchanged words with Calle. But then, I suspected she could draw faster than Tagg in virtually any circumstance. Or maybe she wasn’t as ready or willing to deal out violence as Tagg was.

Then I had to lower my eyes, to hide the tears that were welling. Needed just a few moments. Just a few more seconds.

Alexandria arrived the same way she had after her last two excursions, through the hole in the roof. With the speed she moved, she didn’t risk being spotted. Even photography wasn’t in the cards.

With the speed she moved, she didn’t seem to notice the bugs that followed after her as the aperture began to close behind her.

She got as far as the Wards HQ before she stopped and the bugs had a chance to catch up to her.

As though I’d thrown a javelin, they speared right for her nose and open mouth, the fastest moving bugs I had at my disposal, and spiders.

She was invincible, the flesh inside her throat untouchable. The flap that kept food out of her lungs kept the bugs at bay. At first. They bound themselves together, spiders fixing themselves and others to the inside of her throat with adhesive.

As strong as she was, air didn’t move past the mass of bugs that filled her mouth, as they fought to move into positions where they could block her throat. She coughed in an instinctive attempt to dislodge them.

Even with super strength, even with a diaphragm like hers, the coughs didn’t remove every bug, and the greedy gasp of air allowed those who remained to find their way inside, filling her lungs. They were just as impervious inside, but the bugs arranged themselves side by side, forming a layer that blocked the flow of oxygen to the membranes of the lung itself. Spiders drew out silk, filling gaps.

If she could choke, if Leviathan saw submerging her in water as a viable tactic, if Tattletale saw fit to try to do the same, then I could drown her in insects.

The Wards were watching, realizing what was going on. Clockblocker ran, pressing a button for the alarm.

And in front of me, Tagg moved, drawing his gun. His voice was a roar, “She knows!”

A thread caught it before he could point it at me, and it fell to the ground.

With each entry that had been made into the interrogation room, barring the one where she’d used the drone in Imp’s cell, I’d brought more bugs inside. Spiders, hornets, black widows, brown recluses and more.

I’d warned him. He jumped as he felt the bites. Shouted as hornets found the soft tissues of his eyes, his tongue and eardrums. Black widows and brown recluses found crevices.

Miss Militia moved too, but the silk I’d used only bound her hand, didn’t serve to stop her.

“Taylor!” my dad’s voice sounded so far away.

I’d promised myself I wouldn’t let the bullies win again, I thought. That I’d stop the monsters.

But the thoughts sounded disconnected, false.

No, this was revenge. Something simpler than any of that.

Miss Militia raised a gun, pointing it at me, where I had my head bowed, hands still chained in front of me. My dad was shaking me, but I wasn’t a hard target to hurt.

And my bugs weren’t hurting her. Weren’t touching my dad, or Mr. Calle, who was backed up into a corner, trying to make as much distance from me as he could.

She didn’t shoot. Her gun clattered to the ground.

“Taylor!” she called out, as if she could reach me that way. “I’m not going to shoot, but you have to stop!”

“Not a promise, not an oath, or a malediction or a curse,” I said, sounding calm, probably inaudible in the midst of Tagg’s screaming. “Inevitable. Wasn’t that how she put it? I told them. Warned them.”

Alexandria, in the basement, still choking, drowning on dry land with lungs full of dragonflies, spiders and cockroaches, soared. She flew through the closed barrier in the roof, and debris showered down on the Wards who’d approached her, wanting to help but finding themselves unable.

In moments, she was out of my range, too high in the air. I wasn’t sure it mattered.

And Tagg- Tagg was staggering towards me, roaring something incoherent, chewing and spitting in a feeble attempt to remove bugs from his mouth. His tongue was likely swollen already. The black widow venom would take effect soon.

He tried to push my dad out of the way, and my dad blocked him, shielding me with his body.

Tagg kicked my father hard enough to drive him to the ground. The Director was still shouting, nearly blind. He gripped me by the hair and slammed my head down on the table, hard.

I saw stars, felt tears welling out freely, as if the dam had finally broken.

Blind, writhing in pain and a struggle to get the insects off him, Tagg still managed to hold me down as the PRT officers burst into the room. They had darts like the one that Shadow Stalker had kept in her crossbow, jammed one into my neck.

I had only the chance to think of how they’d just signed Tagg’s death warrant, that my power would work while I was unconscious. I could have rescinded the order in the last moments. I didn’t.

And then it was only darkness. Oblivion. A false kind of death.

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Cell 22.3

Posted on May 9, 2013 by wildbow

283

Last Chapter Next Chapter

The door slammed shut as the last of the heroes departed. They joined the PRT uniforms and Wards who had gathered just in front of the elevator, leaving me and my lawyer to talk in private.

It should have been quieter, but things got more disruptive. The moment the door was shut, a handful of seconds passed, and then everyone started talking. Mr. Calle saying something to me, Director Tagg talking to his deputy and Miss Militia, Clockblocker talking with his teammates.

“This is more or less what we expected…” Mr. Calle was saying.

“Call him. And let me know when he arrives.” Director Tagg, talking about my dad.

“She wanted to defect,” Clockblocker told the waiting Wards. “Join Defiant and Dragon, go hunt the Slaughterhouse Nine…”

“You created pressure with the deadline, he’s trying to turn it around on you…” Mr. Calle said.

“I know he’s trying to turn it around on me,” I said. I slid forward until I was sitting on the very edge of the chair, my elbows on the table, forehead resting against my hands. “I didn’t think he’d be this stupid, and I kind of hoped someone would speak up, give a little momentum to what I was proposing.”

“People are stupid,” Mr. Calle said. “The question is how we can use that. If we-”

Some heroes simultaneously began to voice their thoughts, to the point that I failed to take any of it in. It was too much. Too much input, all together. I couldn’t track it all. I shut my eyes. “Do me a favor?”

“You’re the client.”

“Five minutes,” I said. “Five minutes to think, with some quiet.”

“Would pen scratches bother you?”

I shook my head.

Mr. Calle didn’t reply to that. Instead, he started writing on a pad of yellow, lined paper, apparently unconcerned that I’d just brushed him off.

“…a hot button for her,” Mrs. Yamada was telling the Director. “It’s a pattern, with the timeline we established. Something happens to her father, and she escalates.”

“Yes,” the Director replied. “But let’s not talk about that here. Not while she could be listening. We give Kid Win’s drones a chance to check us over before talking about any of that…”

“Hunting the Slaughterhouse Nine?” Vista was asking. The Wards were lagging a short distance behind the adult members of the PRT and Protectorate.

“Yeah. As in, step down from her position here, stop the guys who are supposed to end the world,” Clockblocker said.

“She didn’t kill any, did she?” Kid Win asked.

“Grue supposedly killed Burnscar, Piggot killed Crawler and Mannequin, they killed Cherish themselves, basically, Vista finished off Shatterbird after things caved in on them at the Echidna fight… no, Skitter didn’t kill any, I don’t think. She was there, though. Have to give her credit, she made a difference in that last fight with Mannequin and Crawler.”

“Which doesn’t matter,” Tagg said. He’d overheard, it seemed, and stopped at the open elevator door. “Because she also wanted us to condone criminal activity in this city. Think about what that really means. Your careers would be dead in the water once people caught on to the fact that you weren’t going after the real threats. You’d be known for being corrupt. Flechette’s actions threaten to taint this organization for some time to come..”

“Wait, wait,” Kid Win said, “Flechette?”

“We’re telling them?” Clockblocker asked. “It’s confirmed? It’s not a trick?”

“It’s not Regent,” Miss Militia said. “The timing doesn’t fit. No, it doesn’t look like it’s a trick. She sent us an email and the details include only things she knows. It feels right.”

There was a pause.

“What happened?” Crucible asked.

“Flechette is stepping down from the Wards program. She is going to be assisting the Undersiders in the future, helping Parian,” Miss Militia said.

“No!” Vista said, raising her voice. “No! She became a villain? What… what the hell!?”

“Vista,” Clockblocker said. “She was in love.”

“She was still one of us. Did you do something?”

I wasn’t sure who she was talking to, until Tagg responded, “No. We didn’t do a thing to her. Everyone that’s been in Brockton Bay over the past weeks and months has dealt with a lot, and I think this is her wrestling with something on her own. I have immense respect for Flechette, and all I can do, all we can do, is hope she comes to her senses.”

“What about her parents? Her family?” Vista asked.

“I can’t talk about anything my patients discuss with me in my office,” Mrs. Yamada replied. “I’m sorry.”

“She came from a broken home,” Miss Militia supplied the information instead. “She bounced between her mother, her father and the surrogate mother who had attempted to renege on the deal they’d made and keep her. With the number of times she changed between them and moved, I can’t imagine she has strong ties to the idea of ‘home’. Even within the Wards… New York has five small teams, and she moved between them as she changed residences.”

“She didn’t say anything about that.”

“It didn’t matter in the here and now. Her focus, her path, was school, her career with the Wards. She didn’t have much in the way of roots, but she had direction. I think that the events following the Echidna crisis left her more devastated than she let on.”

“Can I call her?” Vista asked.

“I don’t know if that would be wise,” Miss Militia said.

“Do,” Tagg said. “Remind her what she’s leaving behind, tell her how you feel, then let her be. Too much pressure and she’s liable to be stubborn. Give her time to think, and you may sway her.”

“Okay,” Vista said.

“When you’re done, join the others in discussing battle plans. I’d rather not wait for Skitter’s forces to strike. If it comes down to it, we mobilize first.”

“We’ll be fighting Flechette,” Vista said.

Tagg nodded. “Very possible. If you don’t feel confident you can do it in good conscience, then I won’t make you. In the meantime, I’m requisitioning capes from nearby areas. If it comes down to it, I want to be ready for a fight.”

“And if they don’t give us the chance?” Miss Militia asked.

I missed Tagg’s response. It was monosyllabic.

“If the Undersiders try to avoid direct engagement and attempt to come at us from another angle? Media? Revealing telling details? Financially? Through our families?”

“Oh shit,” Clockblocker said.

“They wouldn’t, would they?” Crucible asked.

“They would,” Kid Win said. “Probably.”

“They would,” Director Tagg agreed. “And I already have ideas in mind. This situation is far from unmanageable. Rest assured. I’ll need to make some calls. Miss Militia, are you up for another walk?”

“Yes.”

Tagg stepped into the elevator, holding the door open. It was too small for everyone to fit inside, but Miss Militia, the deputy and Clockblocker joined him.

Mrs. Yamada started to step inside, then paused while standing in the doorway. “I’ll be in my office all day. If any of you need to talk about Flechette, or anything else that’s going on, come see me.”

There was no reply. There might have been nods, but I didn’t have bugs on top of any of the Ward’s heads.

The doors shut, and a few seconds passed, Kid Win, Crucible and Vista standing in the hallway with a handful of PRT officers.

“Fuck,” Vista said. “Fuck this. Fuck you, Skitter, if you can hear me.”

I waited to see if there was more, but neither she nor her teammates said anything. The drones Kid Win had made were doing a number on my bugs, catching me by surprise when they opened fire with lasers, striking from the other side of the room. It wasn’t easy to avoid them completely, when an exposed bug could get zapped, but keeping my bugs in hiding prevented me from seeing the drones themselves.

Miss Militia left the building, walking. She wasn’t quite out of my range when she made her first call.

“Mr. Hebert?”

I sighed, then shifted position.

“Everything alright?” Mr. Calle asked me. “Needed to get centered?”

“Was listening in,” I said.

“Listening in?”

“I can hear what my insects hear. Tagg is confident. He’s calling in more capes, and preparing for a fight. He’s apparently not too worried about the Undersiders pulling something that isn’t a direct attack, but I don’t know what he’s got in mind, as far as trump cards go. Miss Militia is apparently calling my dad, so Tagg can talk with him.”

“Wonderful,” Mr. Calle said. “Anything else?”

“The Wards are upset over Flechette defecting.”

“Okay. Something to keep in mind. Now, this is difficult to say, but-”

Mr. Calle paused very deliberately.

“What?”

“I would never recommend my clients do anything illegal,” he said.

“But you maybe suspect that if I had any leverage, I should exercise it?”

“I would never say any such thing,” Mr. Calle said. He smiled. “But now that you mention it…”

“There are options,” I said. I thought about the areas of attack that Miss Militia had outlined. Family would cross a line. Something to shake their confidence in the coming conflict. “Can you pass on a message?”

“That would be a mistake, I think. I walk a fine line as it is, and I won’t have a hand in anything direct.”

I frowned.

“Let’s talk about what I can do. First off, I think we should change things up. As it stands, the Protectorate East-North-East holds Brockton Bay in a specialized state of emergency. It’s a legal wild west, with very little precedent holding things together. Director Tagg reports to his superiors, who report to the United States government. This circumvents a great many of the usual checks and balances. Checks and balances I think we should put back into play.”

“How?”

“Contacting the District Attorney and bringing her to the discussion would tie Tagg’s hands, but it would also tie yours. We’d be working entirely within the law, certain items would be taken off the table. You couldn’t ask for condoned villainy, for example. Charges would inevitably move forward against you, but these same things would tie him up in managing things.”

“Doesn’t seem worth it.”

“It depends. It’s… pressure. The Director is focused on a half-dozen things at once. There’s a lot to be said for putting one more thing on his plate. I know he’s not trained in the particulars of law. He’d be forced out of his depth, made to consult others, made to wrap his head around terms he’s not familiar with. It would mandate that you, as a minor, would need a guardian present. Failing that, there’s a great many hoops they’d have to jump through. He’s a soldier. So long as this is a battlefield of some sort, he has a leg up. We can make it something else.”

“Okay,” I said. “We’d be adding pressure, turning things around so he’s the one on his heels, but I’m still not convinced it’s worth the price of admission. Other options?”

“Media.”

“He doesn’t care about image,” I said. “He said he figures it’ll get patched up with good PR in a matter of time, a few days back.”

“It won’t hurt him as badly, then, but he’s more likely to make a mistake if it’s not something he pays attention to.”

“An option,” I said. “It sets a bad tone, though. I’m really looking for cooperation. I’m putting everything on the line in the hopes of getting it. I don’t want them to be enemies, not any more than they are. And I don’t know that just talking to the media is going to be enough to get the results I want.”

“It isn’t, frankly. Are there points you’re willing to compromise on?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Because he’s not willing to meet me halfway.”

Mr. Calle rubbed his chin. “Okay.”

“So we need leverage, and it can’t be legal. Going to the District Attorney or the media has drawbacks.”

“Yes.”

“Then I need you to get in contact with Tattletale. Only we’ll be above-board, mostly, about how we handle it. She’s been arranging things for a while. Now it’s time to figure out just how much clout she has. We’ll hit them with the biggest card we have. We’ll make a play for ownership of the portal. Successful or not, it’ll distract them.”

“I’ll do what I can to get in touch with her, then. My firm’s assets will be at your disposal, of course.”

I nodded.

He stood from his seat to make the call. Apparently he didn’t find them much more comfortable than I did. He paced as he waited for the phone to ring. “Cecily? Need you to pull some strings. And route me to someone, best if it’s untraceable.”

It wouldn’t be a direct call. That didn’t make sense. I focused my attention elsewhere in the building. The outlet that fed Kid Win’s anti-bug drones… I found the wiring in the walls and ordered cockroaches to start chewing through it.

Petty, maybe, but I didn’t want to be disarmed, not with the way things were going.

The heroes were returning, Sere and Dovetail entering the lobby. I planted bugs on Dovetail as she made her way indoors, and as discreetly as I was able, I transferred the bugs to Tagg and Miss Militia, who were waiting.

“They’re moving,” Dovetail said, “… soldiers. Arming civilians. Squads no larger than five people, across the city.”

“Good,” Tagg said.

“That’s all.”

“Tell the others,” Miss Militia said, “Adamant’s getting a cycle retooled to handle more weight before he leaves again. He’ll go with Triumph. Log it all in the system.”

“Will do,” Dovetail said. Miss Militia patted her on the shoulder as she made her way inside.

Miss Militia and Tagg remained in the lobby, by the hallway to the elevators. They didn’t say much. A few words on degrees of lethal force, but no camraderie, not even much in the way of small talk.

My cockroaches found their way through the wire, and promptly died as they came in contact with the live circuit. A breaker blew, but Kid Win didn’t seem to react.

Hopefully the drones wouldn’t get a chance to recharge.

A few minutes passed, as my lawyer got in touch with someone, and started talking about media contacts. Then my father arrived.

I could sense him as he got out of a truck in the parking lot, making his way inside.

“Mr. Hebert,” Miss Militia said, extending a hand.

My dad shook it.

“Thank you for coming in again,” Director Tagg said. He extended a hand. Again, my father shook it.

“My office?” Tagg asked.

My dad nodded.

My pulse was pounding as Miss Militia, Tagg and my father entered the elevator and made their way upstairs.

“She’s here?” my dad asked.

“In a room downstairs with her lawyer,” Miss Militia answered.

“She hired him herself?”

“I imagine she did,” Miss Militia said. “With the speed he pulled things together, I suspect she may have more working in the background. Crime does pay, if she’s paying their salaries. They’re apparently top of the line, as parahuman defense attorneys go.”

“I can’t believe this is all real.”

“It is,” Miss Militia said. “It’s very real.”

“And very real blood will be shed tonight,” Tagg said, “If we can’t rein her in.”

Rein me in.

They exited the elevator and made their way to Tagg’s office.

“These,” Tagg leaned forward, and my bugs could hear something move. “Are the charges as they stand.”

I didn’t sense it, but my bugs could hear papers rustle. I might not have identified the sound if I hadn’t had the context.

A few long seconds passed, and I could hear the rustling again. The turning of a page.

I clenched my fist.

“Problem?” Mr. Calle asked, covering the mouthpiece of his phone.

“My dad’s here. They’ve got him in Tagg’s office, and they’re filling him in on their version of events.”

“Right. Let’s put a stop to that. I’ll be back.”

Phone still pressed to his ear, he picked up his briefcase, tapping on the door three times with the side of his shoe.

A PRT uniform unlocked and opened the door, and my lawyer strode out. It shut behind him.

Upstairs, my dad turned another page.

He was reading through it all. All the details I’d gone over with my lawyer, only without my feedback, without my voice to point out the places where they were going a little overboard, naming charges they could throw at me, without checking whether they could stick. Not that the difference was that big, comparing what I’d actually done to what they were accusing me of.

I heard the sound of him flipping through the last few pages before he dropped the pad on the table. “Okay.”

“She’s in a lot of trouble,” Tagg said.

“This isn’t news to me,” my dad answered, his voice quiet.

“If the charges went through, she would face being charged as an adult. The three strikes protection act wouldn’t mitigate things. I’d say the worst case scenario is execution, or indefinite detention in the Birdcage, but the best case scenario for her isn’t much better.”

My dad didn’t reply to that.

“Her power means we can’t keep her in a conventional prison. She’s too flexible, too versatile for us to use any of our current means of keeping her from using her ability. Even today, contained in a cell, she’s been literally ‘bugging’ us to track our movements and listen in on conversations. We had our tinker put together a countermeasure, but it’s not perfect.”

Again, my dad was silent.

“I have two daughters. Four and six years older than Taylor,” the Director said. “I can’t imagine.”

“I can’t either,” my dad said. “Like I said, it doesn’t feel real.”

“I’d like you to come with me the next time I speak to your daughter.”

“She didn’t listen to me before, she won’t listen now,” my dad said.

“I didn’t ask you to come because I thought you could convince her,” Tagg said. “You don’t have to say anything, as a matter of fact.”

What was he up to?

My lawyer had reached the top floor, and was striding between cubicles and desks. He raised his voice to ask a question I couldn’t make out, and someone answered him. He altered his course slightly in response, walked with more purpose, directly for Tagg, Miss Militia and my father.

“I’d like to talk to her alone,” my dad said.

“We can arrange that,” Tagg said.

I clenched my fists. Using my dad as a pawn? Damn right I was going to escalate. Which, I suspected, was exactly what Tagg was aiming to achieve. This was something to put me off balance, just like we were looking to do to him by way of leveraging control of the portal.

My lawyer knocked on the door and then opened it without waiting for a response. “My client would like a word.”

“Of course,” Tagg said. As the four of them exited his office and made their way to the elevator, I turned the two words around in my head. Had he sounded sarcastic? Did he simply expect me to interrupt?

I couldn’t say. I could only wait as they made their way downstairs. I was stuck, my back hurting where my arms were in a more or less fixed position. I stood, stretched as well as I was able, tossed my head to one side in an attempt to get my hair out of my face. When that didn’t work, I bent over and lowered my face to my hands to tidy my hair.

Then I sat, stewing in unidentifiable emotions. Trepidation, dread, fear, guilt, shame, anger, relief… none I could put a finger on.

“Did you know?” Miss Militia asked.

“Me?” my dad asked, by way of response.

“Who she was? What she was?”

“Yes,” he said. I could feel alarm sing through me, inexplicable, but jarring. Then he seemed to change his mind, “No.”

And the emotion that hit me at that was just as strong as that misplaced sense of alarm.

Damn Tagg. Damn him for bringing my dad into this.

The four of them stopped outside of the cell. Miss Militia used her phone to unlock it, and Tagg gestured for my dad to enter.

I saw him hesitate as he stepped into the room, dark sheet metal, a reflective pane of one-way glass, the metal table bolted to the floor, my handcuffs, locked to the table in turn. Me, with my hair in some disarray, a touch damp from the shower and ineffectual toweling, from sweat, in my black uniform with the word ‘villain’ marked clearly across it.

I could see it, his expression changing, the disbelief he’d professed to becoming something else entirely.

His feelings were as mixed as mine. I could tell just by looking at him, by imagining what he’d been through, the person standing by, dealing with the aftermath of everything I’d done. His frustration, his confusion, pain, and embarrassment. His loneliness, disappointment, his fear.

And, somehow, as though it were too much to bottle in, it seemed to boil over in the form of one singular emotion. I could see his jaw shift as he clenched his teeth, met my eyes and looked away. The sudden agitation that seemed to grip him, as he opened and closed his fists.

Tagg and Miss Militia had reached the interior of the room on the other side of the one way mirror, while Mr. Calle stood in the hallway, speaking on the phone. I stood from the chair as my dad approached, his body language making it all too clear what he was about to do. Miss Militia took one look and reacted, turning around to hurry back out of the room, to intervene. Tagg said something, two words I couldn’t be bothered to decipher, and she stopped in her tracks.

My dad raised his hand, palm open, and I closed my eyes, lifting my chin to take the hit.

It didn’t come. My dad wrapped his arms around my shoulders instead. I squeaked, and I couldn’t say whether it was because he was squeezing me too tight or if it was because of an overflow of emotion similar to the one he’d just displayed. I stood there, unable to return the hug with the way I was cuffed to the table, unable to speak around the lump in my throat.

When minutes passed and we hadn’t exchanged a single word, Tagg and Miss Militia stepped out of the observation room, signaling Mr. Calle.

“Let’s talk,” Tagg said.

I broke away from my dad. Blinked where there were tears in the corners of my eyes. I didn’t care if Tagg saw.

“I’m waiting on a response from my colleagues,” Mr. Calle said. “There’s no reason to speak further, unless you’re capitulating.”

“No,” Tagg answered. “But I’d like to go over the main points.”

This was why he wanted my dad here, I thought.

“You’ve informed me that your teammates, many of whom are known murderers, are going to declare war against the PRT in three hours and twenty minutes, without word from you.”

My dad took a seat to my left, watching me carefully.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ve described them as unpredictable. They’re undeniably dangerous. You think they’ll hurt people. They’ll pull out all the stops, to get you back, and to hurt us. The good guys.”

“Yes,” I said, not taking my eyes off Tagg. “But I don’t think you’re a good guy, Director.”

“I don’t think you’re a good person either,” Tagg said, “and the court of public opinion is likely to agree with me before they agree with you.”

“Let’s not resort to name calling this early in the discussion,” Mr. Calle said.

“Right,” Tagg said, “It wastes time, and you have very little.”

“Neither of us want this to happen, Director,” I said. “Neither of us have time, and neither of us want a war. Except maybe you do. Maybe you think you’d win, and it’d be a bump in the PRT’s ratings.”

“No,” he said, “I think, like any altercation, both sides would lose something. But let’s talk about your terms. You want amnesty for your criminal friends?’

I was acutely aware of my dad watching me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You want to depose me, raising Miss Militia to my place, and in the doing, force the PRT to relinquish all ideas of humans governing parahumans, to help keep those with incredible power in check.”

“Yes.”

“And you wanted me to allow you to become an official vigilante, leaving your group behind while you worked to hunt down psychopaths with powers. I’ve explained why that can’t happen. I’m not sure if you intend to change your demands, or-”

“I’ll go to the Birdcage if I have to,” I said. “Because the rest of it, I believe in it enough to make the sacrifice.”

“Taylor,” my dad said. The first words he’d said to me since the breakfast we’d had together, on the day I’d been outed. “Why?”

“Because we’re losing. We’re so focused on the little things, on petty squabbles and factions and vendettas, that we’re losing against the real dangers. The Class S threats. The fact that the world’s going to end in a year and eleven months. Did you hear about that?”

He shook his head. “I… I read the letter you left me, at Annette’s grave. Realized it was probably what you were trying to write, the night you left. Before you changed your mind.”

The night I left, so long ago. When I’d first met Coil.

“A lot of what I did, it was to stop the man who really wanted to take over the city. Who would have been far worse than any of us Undersiders. And I did that because he had a little girl captive. Dinah Alcott. She could see the future, and she says the world ends in two years.”

My dad shook his head, “No.”

“Yes. The heroes know it. It’s a big part of why the PRT is falling apart. You’ve heard about that on the news?”

“I… some. But I haven’t paid much attention since I found out that you-”

“That I’m a supervillain,” I said.

He flinched visibly at that.

“Interesting,” Tagg cut in. “That you call yourself that. You say you’ve had justifications for what you’ve done, but you call yourself a villain.”

I wanted to hit him, for cutting into my conversation with my dad, for polluting my attempts to explain things.

“I am,” I told him. “I’ve done bad things.”

“Left a trail of devastation in your wake.”

“Yes,” I said. “And I’m willing to pay the price. I’ll go to the Birdcage, a place you described as a literal hell on Earth. A place where people just as scary as the ones I’ve spent the last few months fighting stay. A place where some of those very people are currently imprisoned. Lung, Bakuda, Trickster. They probably want to inflict fates worse than death on me. But I’ll do it. Because I really truly believe the world needs the PRT, or a PRT, one without lunatics like you in charge, and maybe bringing me in helps keep a handful more capes in the roster, keeps my friends secure where they are, so they can help.”

I was heated, my words angry.

“Your friends,” he said.

“My friends.”

“That’s the rapist, Jean-paul? Alec? A murderer.”

“Regent. He was the son of a supervillain, screwed from the get go, and yeah, maybe some shady stuff went down, way back then. I think he’s… not in love, but he’s close to Imp. Somewhere between love and friendship, maybe.”

“Imp. She’s the one who makes it a game, to psychologically and mentally torture gang members who step foot in her territory, until they have mental break downs.”

“Yes,” I said, through grit teeth. “It’s more complicated than that, she’s been through a lot, but yes. And I heard directly from people who were grateful to her for scaring off the real rapists and murderers.”

He didn’t pay me any mind. “Who else is there? Hellhound.”

“She prefers Bitch,” I said. “But she’s Rachel to me.”

“Who had her monster dogs chew up innocents who’d gotten in her way.”

“It was a bad time for her. Weren’t you just excusing Flechette, because we’ve all been through some shit? I know Rachel as the person who takes care of wayward souls, grown men and children who are lost in a way even we can’t fathom, with the things we’ve been through.”

“And Grue? Do tell me how you see him.”

“I liked him,” I said. “If I’d stayed with them, maybe he and I would have tried to make it work.”

“Romance.”

I met my dad’s eyes. His forehead was creased with worry. My power was buzzing around the periphery of my consciousness.

I found refuge in the bugs, paid attention to their movements as they avoided the remaining drones, found my center, so to speak. Calm. He wants me upset.

“Romance,” I said. “He was my rock, when I needed a rock. And I was his, when-”

“When he snapped,” Tagg cut in.

“It wasn’t like that.”

“He was the stable one, until he wasn’t stable,” Tagg said. “Until he killed Burnscar. Yet I suspect he’s the one in charge, now that you’ve left?”

“Yes,” I said. “And with the dozens, hundreds of people I’ve tried to take care of or whose lives I’ve saved, I trust Grue to look after them and keep the peace. I wouldn’t give him that responsibility, with all the time and effort I’ve invested in them, if I didn’t trust him.”

“Very generous,” Tagg told me. “And Tattletale. Where do I even start?”

“With the fact that she was my best friend. That she’s maybe our best bet at understanding what’s going on? Understanding the Endbringers and what they’re doing? Understanding powers? Finding the Nine before they bring about the end of the world? Understanding how the world ends?”

“All of this, from the girl who used her power to convince her brother to kill himself, before fleeing, spending years on the streets, stealing wallets and using the account numbers to take whole fortunes?”

“All wrong,” I said.

“And who planted the seeds that led to Panacea breaking down and mutilating her sister.”

“Those seeds were planted a long time before we talked to Panacea,” I said.

This was what Tagg had wanted. He’d devastated my defenses, bringing my dad into this.

“Nonetheless,” Tagg said, leaning back. “So, Danny Hebert, what do you think about your daughter’s friends?”

My dad glanced at me, then looked at the Director. “I know less about them than either of you.”

“That’s not important,” the Director said. “I just want you to answer one question for me. Assume we’re both right. Me and your daughter. Assume that they’re everything we described them as. Do you really want them in control of this city’s underworld?”

Again, my dad looked at me.

“No need to double-check with your daughter. I’m wanting your honest opinion, as a man on the streets, from someone who has to live in this city without any real say over what happens in the cape-on-cape fights and politics. Do you really want them in charge?”

“No,” my dad said.

I did my best not to show it, but the word was like a punch in the gut.

“I’m sorry, Taylor, but-”

“Are they really that much worse than the ABB? Than Empire Eighty-Eight?”

“With them, we…” my dad trailed off.

“With them, we could pretend things weren’t bad!” I said, “But they were worse. You know they were worse. The people you worked with, the addicts, the people without money…”

“Does it matter?” Tagg asked. “You don’t have your dad’s support, what makes you think you’d get anyone else’s?”

I grit my teeth.

“No,” my father said.

“Hm?” Tagg raised his bushy eyebrows.

“No. I think you’re wrong there,” my dad told Tagg. “She has support. When you attacked her in the school, there were people who stood by her. If I’m being honest, I don’t get it, I don’t want those people in charge, but I don’t want any villains in charge. I don’t understand the politics behind this, or the context, but I trust my daughter.”

“Of course you trust your daughter. The curse of being a parent, I know it well.”

“You wanted my opinion,” my dad said, his voice a little firmer, “You get my opinion. Others believe in her. I trust her, even if I don’t know enough to follow what this is all about. Even if I barely feel like I know her right now, I can look her in the eye and know that’s the same girl I’ve spent the last sixteen years with. With some of the worst qualities of my wife and I, and a lot more of the better ones.”

“I wonder how long that opinion will hold,” Tagg said. “Because we have, what is it? Three hours and a handful of minutes? Then the war she set in motion hits this city.”

“It can be avoided,” I said.

“If we cave in to your extortion,” Tagg said. “Except you think too small, Skitter. It’s a common flaw among teenagers, however powerful they are. They attend high school, and all they can see is the school, their peers. Tunnel vision. You’re the same. You’re focused on this city, but you don’t see what happens elsewhere. You don’t see the ramifications.”

“Which are?”

“You’d be strengthening the PRT a little in the short-term, but the long-term? Letting villains take charge, taking the humans out of the PRT, condoning villainy? It would doom us all. What you’re threatening us with? It’s only one fight. And maybe it’s ugly, but it’s one fight. If they kill us, if they become monsters of the Slaughterhouse Nine’s caliber to defeat us, then we win. Your side wins the battle, loses the war. If you don’t go that far? If you leave us in a state to recover? We pick ourselves up and we lick our wounds, and then we rebuild.”

Tagg cupped his hands, moving them as if balancing a scale. “One fight, one set of casualties in one area of one medium-sized city, compared to consequences that reach across North America? Across the world? It doesn’t measure up.”

I glanced at my lawyer.

“You don’t have an answer for me?” Tagg asked.

“I have one,” I said. I hope.

Mr. Calle looked at his phone, then gave me one curt nod.

“What?” Tagg asked.

“It’s in the news,” Mr. Calle said.

Tagg and Miss Militia simultaneously reached for their smartphones. I was probably as tense as they were, as they thumbed past the security screens and found news sites. Miss Militia was a few seconds faster than Tagg.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“It’s all legitimate,” I said. “I’m pretty sure. Legal enough.”

“What is it?” my dad asked.

“Property,” I said. “I expect a great amount of property just changed hands.”

“Who’s Sierra Kiley?” Miss Militia asked.

It was all I could do to keep from smiling with joy. Of all the people to serve as a public face, Tattletale had found Sierra. Someone I owed, in many ways. Someone who’d, maybe, followed recent events and rethought her initial doubts.

“No idea,” I said, maintaining my poker face.

“I don’t understand,” my dad said.

“Quite simple,” Mr. Calle told him. “I believe the PRT has become aware that properties in a wide area around the portal in downtown Brockton Bay, previously under the control of various individuals and groups, just exchanged hands, finding itself in the hands of one singular individual.”

“And that one individual is in thrall to the villains who control this town,” Tagg said.

“I resent the notion,” I told him, and I allowed myself a small smile. “But it would be amusing, if it were true. You might even have to rethink what you were saying about how narrow my worldview is. I mean, that’s a whole other world. Anything but narrow, when you think about it.”

“You’re not as clever as you think you are,” he said.

“Probably not,” I said.

“You’re playing out your hand.”

“And you’re bringing my family into this. Remember how our little feud started? You crossed the line. You made the call to out me, because you wanted me in custody. Congratulations, you got me in custody. You broke the unwritten rules, because you think that you don’t have to obey them, since you aren’t a cape. Except you’re forgetting why they exist in the first place. The rules keep the game afloat. They keep everything afloat, at the core of it. We all know the PRT is a sinking ship. You don’t agree with what I’m doing? Fine. But at least I’m trying to keep it afloat.”

“And you?” my dad asked. It took me a second to realize he was looking at Miss Militia.

“What about me?” she asked.

“You’ve been quiet. Are you here just in case my daughter turns violent?”

“No. She’s not violent. Not in that sense.”

“You don’t have anything to say?”

“As grateful as I am for the right to free speech,” Miss Militia said, “I’m grateful for the right to silence as well.”

“Then you don’t agree with your Director?”

“I didn’t say that. What I’m saying is that there’s no right answer here, and I’m glad I don’t have to be the one to make the decision.”

“Isn’t that cowardly?” I asked.

“No. It’s human, to not want to make the hard choices,” she said. She raised one boot off the ground and placed it on the corner of her chair. “And it’s good strategy to conserve your strength.”

“We’re not fighting,” I said. “We’re not going to get tired.”

“Physically?” she asked. “No. Emotionally? Mentally? Yes.”

“You’re anticipating the fight,” I said. “You don’t think there’ll be a consensus in time.”

She shook her head, then used one hand to fix her hair, tucking it behind one ear. “No. I don’t think there will be a fight. I hope there’ll be a consensus, but it’s not necessary. Your ploys with the portal, controlling the territory around it, it’s clever, it’ll take a lot of time before we can pass legislation or conduct a thorough enough investigation to justifiably seize it. But I’m not worried about that, either, nor am I concerned about the damage Tattletale could do in other areas.”

“Then why do you need to conserve your strength?” I asked.

“Because we’re dealing with the devil,” Miss Militia said. “I’m angry at you, Taylor, and half of that is because you put us in this situation, a set of circumstances where we’re liable to lose either way. Because I agree with the conclusions you came to, how the PRT is needed, the need for compromise, and because I can’t condone how you approached those conclusions.”

She shifted position, and the black-green energy of her flickered from her right hip to her right hand, appearing in her hand, amorphous and shapeless, as if searching for a form to take. When she didn’t grasp it, it darted to her left hip, and the metal of a cutlass clinked against her seat.

“But I really hate you because we had to call her,” Miss Militia intoned.

Her?

Tagg looked at his phone. “Assuming she’s on time, it’ll be less than ten minutes.”

“Her?” my dad asked.

“You’ve played your part,” Tagg responded. “Go. It’d be better in the long run. Wash your hands of this, leave. Your daughter’s in custody, she’s going to one prison or another. You can go home and know that it was inevitable, and that this was the best outcome. It takes a few years maybe, but you lament your mistakes, and you eventually make an uneasy peace with what happened to your daughter.”

“And if I stay?”

“You won’t have any of that peace of mind,” Tagg said, and that was all.

My dad looked at me, “I think you’re wrong. Everything before this, it was the times where I thought I had to walk away, look away, times where I thought things were inevitable, that I regretted the most.”

He took my hand. “I’ll stay.”

“Thank you,” I murmured the words.

Our guest didn’t arrive right away. It might have been fitting, in a dramatic way, for her to appear as we finished our dialogue, but things weren’t so carefully orchestrated in the real world.

“Those things they said you did?” my dad murmured.

“Mostly true,” I said.

He squeezed my hand for a moment, but it wasn’t reassuring. Something else. Concern, maybe, channeled through a simple gesture. Concern for me, for what I’d become.

I wanted nothing more than for my dad and I to talk for a month straight, just to hash things out, to form some kind of balance, some semblance of a connection like we’d once had. Instead, there was only this, like the father-daughter relationship distilled. Not enough communication, barely any familiarity, both of us flooded with very different sorts of fear, confusion, and frustration. I imagined it was much like the bonds that had kept primitive families together in an era when living from week to week was a challenge. Basic, crude, but almost primeval.

She arrived, minutes later. A woman, tall, in a suit, carrying nothing with her. I sensed her at the periphery of my range, walking with a steady, strong stride.

I was reminded of the Siberian, almost. The way she moved with the confidence of the indomitable, the way that she was almost careful as she moved among people. Except that where the Siberian was only careful among her teammates, this woman was careful with everybody.

It took her five minutes to reach us, walking through the crowds, using the pedestrian crossings.

But the person I found myself comparing her to, as she approached the PRT building, wasn’t the Siberian. It was me. She reached her home ground, and people started to recognize her. They reacted, moving out of her way. Showing respect. Showing fear, in some cases.

Three of the Wards were in the elevator when it stopped at the ground floor. Kid Win was taking his drone recharge station apart, which meant it was just Clockblocker, Crucible and Vista that crossed paths with her.

The Wards took only a moment to recognize her as she entered the elevator, and the two native Brocktonites left, pulling a protesting, confused Crucible after them.

In a matter of a minute, she was opening the door to the cell. A woman, the sort who could be forty but looked like she was in her late twenties. Hispanic, insofar as that was a descriptor, with darker skin and long, straight black hair.

But more than her description, the part of her that hit me was her presence. Almost without thinking about it, I got out of my chair, standing, the chains of my cuffs pulling taut against the lock on the table. My lawyer, Miss Militia and Tagg all stood, my dad a step behind them, bewildered. The only one not in the know.

“Chief Director,” I said.

“Deputy Chief. I’ve stepped down from my position, but I still have to train my replacement,” she said, her gaze piercing through me. I couldn’t even tell that one of her eyes was a prosthetic. “And seeing to some leftover crises. Hello, Ms. Hebert.”

She extended a hand. As though driven to accept the handshake by a peculiar gravity, I extended my own hand and shook it. Her firm grip could have pulverized me. I might have been less intimidated if I were trapped in a small pen with an angry bull elephant.

“And Mr. Danny Hebert,” she said. She shook my father’s hand.

Tagg stood from the chair at the table and moved over one left, leaving the seat for his superior. “Since you’ve made up your mind about staying, you’ll need to know. This is Deputy Chief Director Costa-Brown of the PRT.”

My father nodded. I was getting the feeling he was almost shell-shocked. To find out about the end of the world, the situation his daughter was in, and countless other things, the name of this woman might not have even processed for him.

“Otherwise known as Alexandria,” Alexandria said, taking the chair opposite me.

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Cell 22.2

Posted on May 7, 2013 by wildbow

280

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Miss Militia handed me a phone and uncuffed one hand from the table. I dialed the number I’d memorized and waited while she and Director Tagg watched.

“Mr. Calle, Esquire,” the voice on the other line said. He sounded distracted, and the voice was slightly muffled. I could hear noise in the background, voices.

“It’s time,” I said. “I’m at the PRT headquarters, second basement floor.”

“Ms. Hebert! Excellent! I was just telling myself that I’d almost run out of things to see in your city, here, and was about to let myself start being concerned for your welfare if it got much later. I’m in your territory as we speak.”

“My territory?”

“Getting a sense of who you are as a person and a personality. There’s a number of people here who are very concerned for your welfare. They don’t quite believe me when I say I’m looking out for your interests.”

“Okay,” I said. “Big guy? Beard?”

“A young lady, dark-haired.”

I thought for a second. “Tell her ‘fly in a paper box.'”

He didn’t cover the mouthpiece of his phone as he spoke the phrase. There was a pause, then Mr. Calle spoke into the phone once again, “That did it.”

I don’t really care, I thought. I just didn’t want him getting in any trouble. “How soon can you be here?”

“A five minute drive.”

“It’s not a five minute drive from there to here.”

“I’m a fast driver. No need to worry, but… maybe don’t mention it to the law enforcement officials that are looking over your shoulder. Do you have any preferences for donuts? Coffee?”

There was a murmur on the other end.

“Someone’s telling me you want tea,” he asked.

“Just-” Just get here, I was about to say, then I reconsidered. I knew where he was, and I was tempted at the thought. Besides, I knew Tagg was watching me. “A BLT on toasted white and a sugar donut. And tea.”

“They don’t sell any tea here, but I’m sure we can contrive to get you some in a timely manner. I trust you haven’t said anything to the glowering heroes?”

“No.”

“Excellent. Keep your mouth shut, now. I’ll be there in six.”

With that said, he hung up.

“A sandwich, donuts and tea,” Tagg said. He had his arms folded.

I smiled a little, but I didn’t reply.

“Very casual,” he mused. He took the phone, gripped my wrist in his hand and set the handcuff back into place.

I shifted position, and the movement raked the chain of my cuffs against the ring that held them fixed to the table. It was hard to get comfortable. The table and chairs were bolted to the floor, and my hands were held in front of me. I got the impression the setup was meant for villains just a touch taller than I was – I couldn’t quite lean against the chair back without the cuffs cutting into my wrists.

“I’m trying to figure you out,” Tagg said.

I ignored him.

“My aims aren’t very high. I’m not a psychologist, like Mrs. Yamada, I’m not experienced in the ins and outs of the traumas you capes go through or the damage that shit causes. You and I haven’t really squared off yet, like you have with Miss Militia. Those two understand you on levels I never could.”

I glanced at Miss Militia. Her expression was inscrutable behind the stars-and-stripes scarf she wore over the lower half.

“I’m setting my sights lower than that. I’m trying to figure out if you really think you have the upper hand, here, if you’re arrogant enough to expect everything will go your way…” Tagg paused, studying me, as if looking for a response. “…or if you intend to martyr yourself. Is that the idea? You go to the Birdcage, but you make some demands first?”

I would have put my head on the table and tried to close my eyes for a minute, but the setup wasn’t very accommodating. I didn’t want to try to then realize I couldn’t get comfortable.

“Maybe you don’t really get what the Birdcage is. See, I hate it. I was in Lausanne in two-thousand two through oh-three. Fought a whole mess of ugly. People that couldn’t be reasoned with, people who were hopeless, in the grand scheme of it. Victims, as much as anyone else.”

I found myself listening, despite myself.

“We shot them, the people who heard too much of the Simurgh’s song, who weren’t just walking disaster areas, but who’d listened long enough that they lost something. Men, women and children missing that moral center that people like Miss Militia and I have. Hell, even you’ve got morals. They didn’t. I’m sure you heard about it, you’re not that young. Suicide bombers, dirty bombs. Terrorism, if you will. Eleven year olds and old men making their way to Amsterdam or London and opening fire in a crowded area. Just like that.”

Tagg slammed his hand down on the metal table, coinciding with the ‘that’. I jumped a little, despite myself.

He’s just trying to rattle me.

“Once we realized what was happening, we had to act, contain the damage. Contain families. Had to act against people who went home from a day of trying to kill the rest of us and cooked a nice dinner, oblivious to just how fucked they were in the head. People who were otherwise good, who got warped on a fundamental level, left open to the preaching and the incitement of their angrier neighbors. Two years of fighting before we got the word down from on high, that they couldn’t rehabilitate the ones they’d captured, the ones who’d listened too long. The poor assholes would play nice until they saw an opportunity, then they’d take it, do as much damage as they could. Two years fighting good people who’d been convinced they had to throw their lives away fighting an enemy that didn’t exist. So we closed the perimeter, bombed them out, herded them and gunned them down.”

I glanced up, briefly meeting his eyes. The lines around them seemed just a little deeper. I wasn’t sure if it was emotion, memories coming to the surface, or if it was just the lighting in this interrogation room.

“Which takes me back to my original point,” Tagg said. “The Birdcage. I hate it. Hate what it stands for, the affront to our freedoms. The farce of it. You know what that word means, little girl? Farce?”

I almost took the bait and responded, bit my tongue instead.

“Guess not. And Miss Militia said you were smart. When it comes to the monsters and the menaces who are more trouble than they’re worth, I wish with all my heart that we had another option. Look me in the eyes, now. I want you to see I mean what I say.”

I met his eyes.

“I’d rather do what we did in Lausanne than use the Birdcage. End result’s the same. You’re gone from this world. It’s more merciful, understand? If it was legal, if I got the okay from on high, I’d make you kneel in the center of this very room and end you with one well placed bullet. Better than you getting in a van and getting disappeared, dropped into a pit that some of the scariest, meanest capes around haven’t figured out how to escape, a literal hell on earth.”

Disappeared.

“But as much as I hate the Birdcage, I’ll gladly use it if it gets menaces like you off the streets and out of the way of civilized Americans who are trying to live their lives. And my bosses know that. They know I’m just as stubborn as the worst of them, because I’ve fought bastards like the sad souls in Lausanne, who didn’t even know how to yield, and I outlasted them.”

I wasn’t sure I could have responded if I’d been willing to open my mouth.

“I want you to think on that. As much as you see me as an asshole, maybe you look down on me because you think you’re smarter than I am, but you think about what it means that I’d sooner shoot a misguided sixteen year old girl than send her to that place… and I’d sooner send you there than let you go free to keep perverting the system.”

“My lawyer’s here,” I said. I could sense him, striding through the lobby to talk to a receptionist at the front desk. “Mr. Calle. He’s upstairs.”

“Someone will show him the way down here,” Tagg said. “You and I, we can keep chatting here.”

I shut my mouth, frowning. Miss Militia wasn’t acting, wasn’t saying a thing.

“I wonder if you realize what you’ve really done. Pulling the shit you have in this city. Forget the PRT, forget me and the people I work for. Let’s talk about the grander perspective. The precedent this shit sets. You know there’s already been others who tried to do what you’re doing? Take over?”

People have been trying to take over for a long time, I thought, but I didn’t say it aloud.

“People are getting hurt, hurting others, trying to follow in your footsteps. You’re a fucking pioneer, aren’t you? Do you get that? That part of what we’re doing, here, is not just stopping you, dealing with you Undersiders, whatever your excuses might be. It’s the effects that reach across this entire country. The world.”

I didn’t reply. My focus was on Mr. Calle, who was making his way downstairs in the elevator, accompanied by the same PRT soldier who had taken me to my cell.

“What’s the name of the fellow who tried to take over that town in Alaska just a few days ago? You remember, Miss Militia?”

“Hiemal.”

“Hiemal. How many did his people kill?”

“Three.”

“Three dead,” Tagg said. He pulled a chair away from the table, set one foot on it, so he was looming over me.

Mr. Calle appeared in the doorway. I’d looked him up prior to first contacting him, and I’d seen his photos online. I was caught off guard, nonetheless, on two very different fronts.

“Good afternoon,” he said, putting his briefcase down before extending a hand to Miss Militia, smiling in a way that showed off his very white teeth. I’d assumed that his prim appearance in the pictures had been because he’d been anticipating having his photos taken, or because he’d been appearing in public. His black hair hadn’t just been cut, it had been styled, his eyebrows shaped. He had long eyelashes, I noted, and a small cleft in his chin. He was an exceptionally handsome Latino guy, in a light gray suit with a white vest beneath, and a red tie. He had a folder and a paper bag under one arm, in addition to the briefcase he’d put down.

His immaculate appearance was the first thing that caught me off guard, and it set a stark contrast with the corner of one nostril and one of his cheekbones, where, apparently, one of his clients had done some damage. It was a cut, but puckered around the edges where it had been burned, either with fire or some kind of acid.

He extended a hand to the Director, who glowered but shook it. He flashed another white smile at Tagg, “Quinn Calle, I-”

“I know who you are,” Tagg replied.

“Excellent. That should make the rest of this easier. I’d like some time alone with my client. I already have the bulk of the paperwork, but if you could give me anything that came up in the last short while, I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll see what we have,” Miss Militia said. She and Tagg turned to leave.

Calle brushed the seat clear where Tagg had stepped on it, then sat down just to my left. “And Director?”

Director Tagg paused in the doorway.

Mr. Calle pointed at the one-way mirror at one side of the interrogation room. “This is a confidential meeting with my client. I would never imply that anyone in the PRT would be so crass as to listen in, but… let’s leave that room empty until further notice, okay?”

Tagg visibly bristled at the implication. Wordless, he turned to leave.

“And cameras stay off!” Mr. Calle called out at the Director’s back.

Tagg shut the door with a little more force than necessary.

“Ms. Hebert,” Mr. Calle said, without looking at me. He set the folder on the table and began sorting out the contents. He waited until the paperwork was all arranged in front of him before he turned his attention to the paper bag, retrieving my sandwich, a small carton of six donuts, and a small thermos. He met my eyes and spoke, “We finally meet.”

Again, that smile, the kind of smile someone could only really give if they were attractive and they knew it. He didn’t seem to mind the blemish on his face, acted as though it weren’t there, as if that dictated how others would react to it.

“Can we cut out the charm and get to business?” I asked, as I reached for the thermos and sandwich. “There’s something of a time limit.”

The smile dropped from his face, and he was all business. “A time limit. Can I ask?”

“It’s twelve past one,” I said. “We have until eight-thirty.”

“Very well. Let’s get moving. First off, I want to get some things clear. I’m an excellent lawyer, I’ve worked with more than a few big-name villains, as well as heroes who went astray. I have the rest of my firm backing me, and their talents are but a phone call away. But.“ He paused in a very deliberate way. “You should know that I’m not the lawyer you want at a jury trial. We’ve run simulations, and I don’t sell when it comes to juries. This little mark is a good part of that.”

He touched his face, where the scar was.

Mr. Calle continued, “If it comes to a serious trial, I’ll take the backseat and one of my senior partners would represent you.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s fine. I don’t want this to go to trial.”

“Alright. We can work with that. In the meantime, let’s see what we’re up against…”

He turned the first page in one of the neatly bound sheafs of paper. “Charges… chime in, but don’t panic, alright?”

“Okay,” I said.

“April tenth, criminal negligence with a parahuman ability, sixteen charges of assault, sixteen charges of battery with a parahuman ability.”

I tried to think. April tenth? Early in my career?

“Lung,” I said, “I attacked him and his gang. They’re seriously charging me for attacking Lung’s henchmen?”

“They’re going to charge you with everything they think they can get away with and see what sticks. Depending on who they could actually find and convince to testify, they’ll drop charges after the fact. We can maybe use that, or we could, if circumstances were different and we were wanting to take this to trial. No need to worry. Gut reaction? Could they make it stick?”

“The Lung part, yes, but the rest… probably not.”

“Okay. Let’s run down the list. April fourteenth. Thirty two charges of willful felony assault with a parahuman ability. Thirty two charges of hostage taking, technically domestic terrorism, each perpetrated with a parahuman ability. Robbery with a parahuman ability. Willful damage to government property. Disturbing the peace.”

“The bank robbery. I didn’t damage any property.”

“Right. April twenty-fourth? One case of battery.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“An… Emma Barnes. She appeared-”

“Right. No, I remember what that was. It happened, didn’t think anything would come of it.”

“One of the girls who bullied you. Odd that they took their time filing charges on it. Only this past week.”

Tagg must have talked to her. I shrugged.

“Moving on, then. Incidents taking place at the… Forsberg Gallery, May fifth. Five cases of assaulting a law enforcement officer. Five cases of battering a law enforcement officer, three performed with a parahuman ability.”

“That’s attacking the heroes?”

“No. That’d be an entirely different charge, and…” my lawyer flipped through the papers, “Just double checking… there’s a conspicuous lack of charges involving your altercations with major heroes. It could be that they discussed it and didn’t feel it necessary. Things get complicated when capes take the stand, given the issues of identity and character, and they might not have wanted to dredge up old business. If not that, the only way I could imagine it is if the heroes in question withdrew all charges?”

He pitched his voice to make the statement into something of a question.

I thought of Armsmaster. Him? Maybe. But Assault? Miss Militia? That was harder to picture. The Wards? Harder still.

“I don’t know which it is,” I admitted.

“All right. Something to look into, if we have time. Still on May fifth, eighty-one charges of willful felony assault. Still at the fundraiser.”

He raised one eyebrow. I only nodded confirmation.

“Skipping ahead a month to June third, we’ve got… complicity towards one count of kidnapping using a parahuman ability. This was-”

“Sophia Hess.”

“One of the girls who bullied you. Extenuating circumstances, perhaps,” he said. He made a note in the margins of the document. “June fourth, you’re supposedly complicit in class two extortion with a parahuman ability, criminal negligence with a parahuman ability and false imprisonment with a parahuman ability.”

“They… can probably make that stick.”

“June fifth. Treason.”

“Treason.”

“That would be, in effect, declaring war against the government of the United States of America.”

“That’s not what I did.”

“It’s what they’re going to say you did when you took over the territory. I’d expect they already have strong arguments lined up on that front. On the same day, thirty cases of assault and battery. Six cases of aggravated assault with a parahuman ability.”

I nodded.

“June eighth, eight cases of assault with a parahuman ability. June ninth, we’ve got twelve more. June tenth, three cases of assault with a parahuman ability, one case of assault in the third degree.”

“Alright,” I said.

“Thirteenth, we have three more cases of assault with a parahuman ability.”

“Makes sense.”

“Sixteenth of June, disturbing the peace, property damage.”

I nodded. The days were starting to blend into one another, to the point that I wasn’t sure I could guess which charges were referring to which events.

“Seventeenth, five charges of assault and battery. One charge of aggravated assault with a parahuman ability. One charge of criminal extortion.”

“Attacking the mayor,” I said, almost relieved to be able to pinpoint the crime in question.

“And his family, it seems.” Mr. Calle paused, then paged through the rest of the pad. “June eighteenth. Destruction of government property, four counts. Hostage taking, assault and battery of a law enforcement officer. June nineteenth, complicity in another count of treason. Complicity in manslaughter, nineteen counts.”

I nodded. Dragon and fighting in the debate. Given Dragon’s response in the cafeteria, I’d almost expected her to drop any charges involved in the destruction of the suits she’d sent against me. Maybe people higher up than her had charged me anyways. Then there was the manslaughter. “Apparently the murders were staged.”

“We’ll have to look into that. And… that’s the last we have in our actual records. The PRT was slow in sending us the rest, but Miss Militia should deliver it soon. There’s been more in the last week, I take it?”

“More assault and battery,” I said, feeling a touch weary. “Whatever charges come up with the thing at the school. I sort of arranged to have a psychopath kill herself. Um. However you’d charge putting maggots in someone’s eyeballs. In self-defense.”

He didn’t even flinch at that. “I see. And any other charges that might catch us by surprise?”

“Premeditated murder,” I said. “Of a law enforcement officer. Miss Militia knows, but she’s kept quiet on it.”

“I see,” Mr. Calle said. He frowned briefly.

“It was Coil. Director Thomas Calvert was Coil.”

“Alright, then,” Mr. Calle said. He met my eyes, then smiled. “Believe it or not, I’ve handled worse.”

I wasn’t sure if I should feel relieved at that.

“Now let’s talk about our goals. For the record, if we took this to trial, I think we could knock off most of these charges on a lack of evidence and degrees of amnesty surrounding your participation against the various class-S threats. They’re going to want to put together a jury that hasn’t heard of you, which would be difficult. To those people, it’s going to sound downright preposterous that a sixteen year old girl is being charged with treason and terrorism, especially after we reduce the number of assault and battery charges to single digits.”

“I don’t want a jury trial,” I said. “I’ve said this twice now.”

“I know,” Mr. Calle said. “Hear me out. I’m wanting to make sure our expectations are realistic. Theoretically speaking, I think we could get you charged as a minor. Paint a picture of a bullied teenager pushed to the limit, caught out of her depth and, following the Leviathan attack, ensnared in an ugly situation where she’s trying to protect people and the heroes are being unreasonable in how they interact with her. We could use the unwarranted unmasking to indicate just how aggressive and ruthless the PRT has been in regards to you.”

“And if I decided to plea down, in exchange for certain considerations?”

“We can still reduce the charges, which would help reduce the penalties you’d face, but where I’m confident we could get you off in a trial by jury, you’d face some consequences if you insisted on taking this route.”

“Alright,” I said. “I can live with consequences. In terms of holding them to the terms I stipulate, is there any way to set it up so they can’t change their minds after they’ve gotten what they want from me?”

“We can prepare a contract, but that only imposes financial penalties,” Mr. Calle answered me. “The PRT could theoretically get it thrown out of court, and that’s ignoring the possibility that you could be sent to the birdcage. It would depend on the penalties you’re able to levy against them…”

He trailed off.

I thought of Tattletale. “I think I have some ideas.”

“Excellent. But the best way, I’m thinking, is to make it all common knowledge. Let the rest of the country hold them to it. It would depend on whether we could share the details with John and Jane Q. Public.”

“Can we talk about the terms, then?” I asked.

“We can. I got the impression you were able to tell time?”

“It’s one twenty-seven. Six hours and three minutes left.”

“Right then,” he made a pained expression. “A good thing I told my wife I wouldn’t make it to dinner. I’ll get a few of my coworkers on the line. They can pitch in and put an intern to typing things up while we hash this out. You don’t have much ground to stand on, but we can make the legal ramifications as ugly as possible for them if they throw you under the bus.”

■

It took one and a half hours, roughly, to get everything worked out and organized. After that, I had to put up with twenty minutes of waiting while Mr. Calle’s law firm typed it and emailed it to us. It took ten more minutes for my lawyer to run to a nearby print shop and get the paperwork we’d put together. Mr. Calle then insisted on reading the entire thing through. The wait was almost intolerable.

Fifteen more minutes passed as he went through it page by page, with agonizing slowness. I winced a little every time he stopped and went back to check earlier details against whatever it was he was reading.

“It’s bare bones,” he finally said.

“I didn’t expect much else,” I said.

“We could have done better with more notice, I have to say.”

“Too many variables to lay anything out ahead of time,” I said.

“Very well. Let’s bring them in.”

More minutes ticked away as we waited for the others to arrive. Director Tagg, the Deputy Director, Miss Militia, Clockblocker, and Mrs. Yamada… they were gathering in force. Tagg took a seat opposite us, Miss Militia to his left, his second in command to his right.

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

Mr. Calle stood, then walked around the table, handing each person present a copy of the document. I was the only one who didn’t have one in front of me.

“My client, Taylor Hebert, is offering official surrender to the PRT, for a select handful of crimes. This surrender and an admission of guilt would be televised locally, nationally and possibly internationally, dependent on which outlets were prepared to cooperate. In exchange, my client, Taylor Hebert, known by the alias ‘Skitter’, requests some concessions from the Protectorate, PRT and Wards.”

“Televised?” Tagg asked.

“It serves as insurance for my client, and it serves to signal the Undersiders to stand down, should they be considering any sort of aggression for the capture of their leader and friend.”

“Right,” Tagg said. “Let’s pretend she didn’t plan for that. Go on.”

“To begin with, the remaining members of the Undersiders will be given leniency for past crimes. With the understanding that the Undersiders are serving to police this city’s underworld where the Protectorate is unable, the group would cease to be the target of any aggression or harassment on the part of the PRT, Protectorate or Wards. This fact would not be disclosed to the public, but would serve as a truce to allow both sides to carry out their respective duties in the service of Brockton Bay.”

“You’re kidding me,” Clockblocker said.

“You want us to play nice,” Tagg said.

I watched Miss Militia. We’d already discussed this point. I’d gauged her response. Now I was putting it out there in simple, clear terms, making it official. I couldn’t be sure if she’d hold to her word or if it would collapse under the bureaucracy.

I’d tested her once, and she’d informed Tagg of what I was planning. This would be a second test, of sorts.

“Special allowances,” Mr. Calle said, “Would be made for crimes committed in the future, within specific limits detailed on page three of the paperwork you have in front of you.”

“You want to neuter us,” Director Tagg said. “Stop us from policing the criminals who run this city.”

“As my client phrased it, Director, we’re hoping to free you to focus your efforts on real targets.”

“You can want it and begin again,” Tagg said, “But I won’t stand by and watch it happen.”

“Quite alright,” my lawyer responded. He flashed a smile, “I expect that’s why Ms. Hebert has asked that you retire, Director Tagg. Her colleague, known by the alias Tattletale, has apparently confirmed that you’ve put in the requisite number of years. You could collect your pension without issue.”

I watched as Tagg leaned back in his seat. He gave me a smug look. He thinks he got to me.

“You’re dangerous,” I said. “You’ve got a soldier’s mentality at a time when we need peace. You’d let the world burn to… give me a bloody nose. You said it yourself. You’re unyielding, and we need compromise.”

“A reality that Ms. Hebert feels Miss Militia would be better equipped to accommodate,” my lawyer added. “That’s our third term.”

There weren’t any retorts or rebuttals from the ‘good guys’. Instead, they exchanged glances across the table, everyone looking between Miss Militia and Director Tagg.

“The PRT is led by non-capes,” Miss Militia said.

“That can change,” I said. “Nearly a week ago, you and I had a conversation. We talked about the issues within the PRT, the fact that you had to kowtow to non-capes and all the problems that posed. I think the non-capes who tend to find powerful positions in the PRT are getting there by dangerous roads. They tend to have backgrounds with the police, military, and anti-parahuman strike teams. It sets up a combative mindset, where we don’t need one. With a cape in charge of the local team, at the very least, I could hope that there’d be a shared perspective.”

“You think Miss Militia would be easier to manipulate,” Tagg accused me.

“I think she’s a no-nonsense type. I know she’s a respected cape, that her power… it’s not one you want to cross paths with, so there’d be little doubt she could put up a fight if it came down to it. And she listens. She doesn’t always do what I’d want her to, but I can live with that.”

“This sets a precedent,” Miss Militia said. “One that I doubt our superiors would be happy with. One I doubt the public would be happy with.”

“When I showed up the night you guys outed me to the public, Tagg was boasting about your fantastic public relations department,” I said. “How virtually anything could be sold to the public, given time.”

“It’s ultimately up to the Director,” Triumph said, “But what if, hypothetically, we had a figurehead leader, with Miss Militia as the person that was really calling the shots?”

I shook my head. “Not good enough.”

“You actually have the temerity to play hardball?” Tagg asked, his voice rising a notch. “I think you’re missing the fact that you’re securely in our custody, and you already surrendered. If it comes down to it, we can see you shipped off with Dragon and Defiant, keep you airborne and away from any large body of insects until your trial by teleconference.”

“And my teammates?” I asked.

“That’s up to you,” he said, “But I don’t think you have it in you to sacrifice them for… this.”

“I guess I have a higher estimation of them than you do. Don’t tell your people to stop underestimating me, only to slip up and expect to win wholesale against the rest of the Undersiders. I think they’d surprise you. Surprise all of you.”

“You said you need compromise,” Miss Militia said. “But you won’t budge on this point? A figurehead leader would keep the public content and give you what you’re asking for.”

“What I want,” I said, “Is to set a precedent. Fixing Brockton Bay doesn’t do a thing, if we don’t leave doors open to fix things elsewhere. If one cape becomes head of the local PRT, then it could happen elsewhere.”

Director Tagg drummed his fingertips on the metal table for a few seconds. When he spoke, his tone was derisive. “Your arrogance boggles the fucking mind. You want to change the world, and you think a confession on television and the threat of your friends attacking the PRT will be incentive enough? You’re not that big a fish.”

“I don’t want to change the world,” I said. “I want to make it possible for things to change.”

“Semantics.”

I sighed. My glasses were slipping down my nose. I had to bend over to put them in reach of my hand so I could push them up.

“Is that it?” Miss Militia asked.

“One more thing,” Mr. Calle said. “My client has a request.”

All eyes turned to me. I straightened. “I recognize that I’m asking for some big things. I’m hoping that the… scale of some of what I’m asking for is tempered by the fact that this is all constructive. It puts us in a better place and leaves us prepared to face down the real threats: the impending apocalypse, the Endbringers, the forces who’d want to move into this city and abuse the portal. I’m going to ask for one more thing in that vein. Don’t send me to the Birdcage. Don’t send me to juvie, or hang me for treason. It’s… not constructive.”

“What would you have us do?” Mrs. Yamada spoke up.

“Use me. I get that it wouldn’t work, having me join the Wards. Too much baggage. But… the end of the world hinges on Jack Slash doing something within the next two years. You absolved Armsmaster of his crimes and sent him out to hunt them down. Do the same with me. I can cover a lot of ground in a search, I have experience fighting them, and if you needed it, nobody would even have to know I was doing it. I’d be one more body on the ground, relatively discreet, and maybe that gives us all a slightly better chance of keeping Dinah’s prediction from coming to pass.”

I wasn’t even done talking when I saw the looks, felt a sinking in my gut as the various people in charge exchanged glances. Tagg smiled a little. Miss Militia looked… concerned. The only person who looked as confused as I felt was Clockblocker.

“What?” I asked.

“Your intel is out of date,” Tagg said. His heavily lined eyes were staring at me, studying me.

“What?” I asked. “You already stopped them?”

“No,” he said, and the word was a growl. He didn’t elaborate further.

“Taylor,” Miss Militia rescued me, “Do you know where the Slaughterhouse Nine went after leaving Brockton Bay?”

“A series of small towns, then Boston,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “And they struck one target after Boston. Toybox.”

I remembered seeing the name on Tattletale’s bulletin board. “Who or where is Toybox?”

“What’s Toybox, you mean,” the Director said.

“What’s Toybox?” I asked.

“May I?” Miss Militia asked Tagg. He gave her a curt nod, and she took hold of the laptop in front of him. It took her a few moments to log in and open the page. She unplugged the cord from the laptop and handed it to Mrs. Yamada, who handed it to my lawyer. He set it so we could both see it. Mr. Calle clicked the touchpad to page through the various images and documents.

“Toybox is a black market organization,” Miss Militia said. “Tinkers who operate solo find life rather difficult, due to a lack of resources and the fact that gangs and government organizations are very, very persistent when it comes to recruiting them. Faced with the prospect of spending their lives on the run, trying to avoid being forcibly recruited into one organization or another, most turn to the Protectorate or the Wards. For those few who don’t, Toybox is… was a refuge of sorts. Tinkers would join, share technology, stay in the enclave as long as they needed to build up a reputation and whatever tools they needed, they would share thirty-three percent of any proceeds with the rest of the group, helping to keep others afloat. Toybox sustained itself with barter, by moving frequently, operating between the scope of heroes and villains, and by selling less-than-legal goods to criminal groups.”

I could see the images, grainy black and white photos of various tinkers huddled together, or standing behind tables loaded down with ray guns and the like. There was a chronology of sorts, to the point that I could see the group evolve, some leaving as others joined, the enclave shifting from a group as small as four members to as many as fifteen.

“The Slaughterhouse Nine attacked them at the end of June,” Miss Militia said. “In doing so, they appropriated all of the tinker technology and all of the tinkers that were staying with the group. See page thirty-six and on.”

Mr. Calle paged forward until the images showed up.

Pyrotechnical. A tinker focusing on flame manipulation, special effects, guns.

Cranial. A tinker specializing in neurology. Brain scans, draining thoughts, recording thoughts.

Big Rig. A tinker who built drones that built things in turn, particularly buildings.

Bauble. A girl who specialized in glassworking and glassworking tools, including tools that could turn inorganic matter into glass.

Dodge. A boy, twelve, who made access devices for pocket dimensions.

Toy Soldier. A powersuit user with a suit the size of a small building.

Glace. A tinker specializing in cryogenics and stasis.

“The Nine have access to all of their work?” I felt an inarticulate feeling of horror creep over me. I couldn’t imagine anything particular, but anything that enhanced the capabilities and options that Slaughterhouse Nine had at their disposal?

“And access to the work of Blasto, a cloning specialist they assaulted and kidnapped in Boston,” Miss Militia said.

I sat back and the chain of my cuffs went taut, my arms stretched out in front of me. “This doesn’t change things. If anything, you need all of the help you can get. This is serious.”

“It’s complicated,” Miss Militia said.

“Seems pretty damn simple,” I said.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Because they’re gone. They stopped.”

I shut my mouth, staring.

“The Slaughterhouse Nine attacked Toybox, taking the group’s devices for themselves, and they disappeared. We suspect they used Dodge’s devices to exit into a pocket dimension, and by the time we’d found a way to follow, they’d exited elsewhere.”

“They’re dimension hopping?”

“Dodge’s devices only exit from Bet to pocket worlds he creates with his devices, back to Bet. We believe they exited somewhere on Bet, possibly in another state, then used another device to hide. Which would be where they are now. Without knowing where they entered that particular pocket, we can’t hope to find them,” Miss Militia said. “We know their patterns. They tend to cut a swathe of destruction across North America, and it’s rare for even a handful of days to pass without them taking any action at all. Between the PRT’s past experience with the group, our thinkers, and the fact that they haven’t made an appearance in nearly ten days, we believe we’ve worked out what they’re doing.”

I stared at the laptop. It was still on the last page. Glace.

“Cryogenics,” I said.

“Stasis,” Miss Militia agreed. “The pressure grew too intense, with Defiant and Dragon’s pursuit, they weren’t recovering from losses fast enough. They’ve gone into hiding, and we think they plan to wait.”

Wait, I thought.

“How long?” Clockblocker asked.

“We can’t know for sure,” Miss Militia replied. “But if they’ve put themselves in a cryogenic sleep, they could wake and resume their normal activities days, weeks, months or years from now. Depending on the resources they have available, they might well emerge with clones of their current members at their side.”

Tattletale should have told me, I thought, even as I knew why she hadn’t. Her power had been out of commission. She’d been out of commission. We’d known the Nine attacked the Toybox, but we’d missed what that meant in the grand scheme of things. Through a combination of Tattletale’s ailment and a hundred other small distractions, we’d missed out on the reason Defiant and Dragon had been able to abandon their hunt for the Nine and visit Arcadia.

“Does Jack know?” I asked. “I mean, I know he knows he’s supposed to end the world, but does he know he sets it in motion within two years?”

Miss Militia shook her head. “We don’t think so. Which means that, unless there’s something specific they want to wake up for, we can’t even begin to guess when he’ll have his team wake up.”

Silence hung in the air for long seconds.

“Now you know. These are your demands?” Tagg spoke up.

“We’ll need to discuss things and revise our terms with this new information in mind,” Mr. Calle said, glancing at me. I nodded once.

“Better do some heavy revision,” Director Tagg said. “And do it fast, because it’s not that long until sundown, and I won’t be accepting any of your terms as they stand. You said it yourself, nobody wants this fight.”

I frowned, watching each of them making their way out of the interrogation room.

Tagg joined Miss Militia’s side, and I couldn’t help but notice the way she adopted a guarded position, folding her arms as he approached. It gave me a flicker of hope.

Until the bugs I’d planted inside the fold of Tagg’s collar caught a fragment of something he was saying.

“…her father.”

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Cell 22.1

Posted on May 4, 2013 by wildbow

465

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I remained where I was, hands folded on the back of my head, kneeling, while the PRT officers bellowed at me, almost incoherent, impossible to obey as they gave me contradictory orders. Down on the ground, stand up, throw any weapons to the side, do not touch anything.

They were afraid to approach, too, apparently. Maybe word had gotten out about what happened to Armsmaster when he’d gotten ahold of me at the fundraiser. They each stopped about ten feet from me, forming a loose ring. I’d thought they might have hit me with one of their nonlethal weapons, but they didn’t shoot. Maybe the audience was giving them second thoughts.

Miss Militia broke the stalemate, such as it was. I could see her put one hand on Clockblocker’s shoulder, giving him a gentle push.

In his white costume, he advanced. He was inscribed with images of clocks in gray, some animated, little hands spinning at different speeds at his shoulder, the center of his chest, and the backs of his hands, places where the armor panels were broadest. He crossed the perimeter of guards, getting closer to me.

When I didn’t react, they seemed to take that as permission to move closer. The bellowing reached a crescendo, and one officer was apparently unhappy that I wasn’t already lying prone on the ground. He planted a heavy boot between my shoulder blades, then thrust me into the ground. I only barely managed to turn my head to avoid cracking my chin on the floor, pulling my head back so I didn’t smash it. I felt the air huff out of my chest, pain jolting through me. My chest wasn’t large, was a ways from ‘medium’, even, but that didn’t make it any better when it bore the brunt of the impact.

The other guards were alternately herding the civilians out of the area or forming a wall to keep them from watching.

“Hey!” Clockblocker said. “That’s enough. I got this.”

The shouting stopped. There was only the noise of the guards on the far ends of the room, giving orders to tourists and staff members, taking charge of the situation and escorting people out.

I had to twist my head to look up at Clockblocker. For his part, he stared down at me, his expression hidden by the featureless white pane of his mask.

“This is a trick,” he said.

“Yeah,” I admitted. “But not the way you’re thinking.”

He didn’t respond to that.

“Do you need me to take a different position?” I asked.

“Once upon a time, I would have had something clever to say in response to that,” he said, quiet.

“What?”

“Nevermind. Kneel, with your arms behind you.”

I moved slowly, so I wouldn’t provoke any rash actions from the uniforms, climbing to my knees, then extending my arms behind me.

He reached out and touched the top of my head.

What felt like an instant later, my arms were weighed down. Clockblocker was behind me, his hand on the heavy metal restraints to keep them from slamming into my tailbone. Everyone else in the lobby had moved. The Wards filled the area, along with the members of the Protectorate, new and old. Flechette was only a short distance away, while Miss Militia stood just beside Clockblocker. Even heroes that had presumably been on patrol were back, along with more PRT members than I’d counted in the building when I’d surrendered.

Tagg was there too, flanked by two PRT uniforms and one man who was wearing a suit, rather than a uniform. The deputy director?

I’d lost control of my bugs while I’d been timed out. In many cases, it wasn’t a problem. Still, I’d lost the ability to track most of those who were present, as mosquitoes, flies and ants went about their merry way.

“Stand,” Miss Militia told me.

I tried to stand, but found more restraints on my ankles. They were connected to the massive metal handcuffs I wore, which only made an awkward setup worse.

“Clockblocker,” Miss Militia said. She reached under one of my arms. Clockblocker took her cue and did the same. Together, they hauled me to my feet. They stayed beside me, holding my arms, as they led me past all of the gathered heroes and PRT officers. All people I’d hurt, people I’d humiliated.

I had no friends here.

Director Tagg was lighting up a cigarette, despite the prominent ‘no smoking’ signs nearby. As I passed, he gave me a hard stare, heavily lined eyes glaring beneath thick black eyebrows, his face otherwise expressionless. He pointed, and a PRT uniform joined our group.

Miss Militia handed me off to Triumph, and he helped Clockblocker lead me through the corridor to the PRT elevator. The doors whisked shut, sealing the four of us inside.

Damn, these handcuffs were uncomfortable. They had to be a design meant for the heavy hitters, for capes who could rend steel with their bare hands. Was it spite that made them use these cuffs?

They weren’t reading me my rights. Was there a reason? I might have asked, but I didn’t want to show ignorance. Better to be confident, to act as if I knew exactly what was going on.

Above us, Tagg extinguished his cigarette, barely touched, fished in a nearby trashcan for a soda can, and dropped the butt inside before disposing of it.

I couldn’t quite make out his words. Not enough bugs in position. “- now. PRT-”

All of the capes mobilized, joining Tagg and his immediate underlings in entering the stairwell. The PRT moved as well, but in a wholly different direction. They were taking defensive positions, leaders barking out orders.

I couldn’t be absolutely sure, given how little I knew about guns, but I was pretty sure the PRT was packing more in the way of lethal weapons than they had been on my last visit.

The elevator stopped, so gently I might have missed it if my bugs didn’t give me perspective on a larger scale. We stepped out into a brightly lit hallway.

“This is an E-type containment cell. Countermeasures include containment foam and these beauties,” Triumph said.

Beauties?

He was pointing up. I followed the direction and looked. Spheres the size of beach balls, chrome, with small windows on the bottom. Familiar.

“Touch the door, make too much noise or use your power, and the room gets flooded with an electric charge,” Triumph explained. “Calculated so it’s only a little less powerful than it’d need to be to do permanent damage. Push it any further and the room is flooded with containment foam. The same measures are packed into this whole hallway.”

Ah. They were the same devices that had been loaded into the drones that one of Dragon’s suits had deployed.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t plan on escaping.”

“What are you planning?” Clockblocker asked.

“Don’t engage her,” Triumph said. He brought us to a stop by one metal door. There was a letter etched on the surface of the metal, a large ‘E’, and smaller codes in boxes beside it. M-21, CC-2, Bat-4

He tapped his phone against the wall, and two sets of metal doors slid open. Very similar to the elevator. Same design?

Thick walls, I noted. The walls that framed the door were a foot and a half deep. It somehow made the small cell a little more claustrophobic. It was daunting as it was, six feet by six feet, with sheet metal laid out over the floor and walls, welded together where they joined, with openings cut in where necessary. There was a vent above me, pumping in a constant flow of fresh air, a little too cold, and another vent beneath the bed, blocked off by a grid of metal bars that extended between the bed and the floor.

The bed itself featured a mattress no thicker than my hand, covered in plastic and laid out on an arrangement of metal strips that wove into one another. The ‘toilet’ wasn’t a toilet at all, but looked to be a urinal, horizontal and sunken into the ground, a shallow chrome basin with a drain and three thick buttons where it met the wall. On the opposite wall, a television was set into the wall, protected by a clear pane. I didn’t see controls or anything resembling a remote.

Above me, another one of those beachball-sized orbs was embedded into the ceiling. Ominous.

Everything was sealed and reinforced twice over. Everything but the vents, but they were too small to crawl through. Was this the kind of cell they put Lung in? With all the metal and the relatively meager amounts of cloth, I didn’t imagine even his pyrokinesis would do much, unless he’d grown considerably.

I turned around to look at my three escorts, and noted that Clockblocker and Triumph had backed off. It was just the PRT uniform, now.

I felt a moment’s trepidation. Was this the point where the PRT officer beat me within an inch of my life, while everyone else turned a blind eye?

“Kit, and one bundle,” the PRT told Clockblocker. I was surprised to note that it was a woman’s voice, behind the featureless helmet. The junior hero hurried off to the end of the hall opposite the elevator. She wrenched me around until my back was to her, then bent down to remove the leg restraints. Triumph stared at me, arms folded, while she did it, the threat implicit. She removed my hand restraints as well, then handed the gear to the hero.

The officer stepped into the cell with me, and the door shut behind her. “Clothes off.”

Oh. Worse than a beating, then.

I tried to tell myself to stay calm, to not be embarrassed. This was a combination of procedure and psychology. They wanted me off guard, feeling vulnerable. In the time Clockblocker had me on pause, Tagg had likely outlined orders to this extent.

I kicked off my shoes, removed my top and running pants, folded them, and set them aside. There were no shelves, so I left them in one corner of the room.

The PRT officer undid the neat folding, rifling through pockets for something, anything, then left my clothes in a heap.

Once I had my underwear off, she checked it, then gave me my next order. “Glasses.”

I removed my glasses and handed them over. She turned them over in her hands, twisted and manhandled them until I worried the frames would snap.

“Shower. Rinse off until I say stop.”

I gave her a quizzical look, and she pointed.

I crossed the room to investigate. Above the toilet, there was an opening in the wall, about four feet above the ground.

“Three buttons,” the uniform said. “Flush, sink and shower. Squat to use the bathroom, get on all fours or squat to shower. If the screen flashes yellow and beeps, that means cameras are going on and someone’s got something to say to you. You’ll have six seconds to finish your business and cover up. Screen flashes red, beeps twice, it means door’s opening. Again, six seconds to cover up.”

A little inhumane, I thought. Would that be more psychological pressure? Regular visits? Interrupting my sleep? Unreliable privacy?

“Rinse,” she repeated.

Maybe Tagg wants me to snap and attack her, I mused.

But I did as she’d asked. The spray was lukewarm, and the stream was directed into the toilet, using the same drain, which made it awkward to get underneath without actually crouching in the toilet itself. That was only compounded by the fact that the vent was still blasting in cool air, chilling the parts of me that weren’t immediately under the stream.

I grit my teeth, told myself that Lung had probably dealt with it, wedging his six-foot-plus frame beneath the stream. It would have been worse for him, being larger, blind, missing something between the legs. Except he maybe hadn’t had a guard in the room with him. Too dangerous.

For an instant, I wished I had enough of a reputation that this woman wouldn’t be there, watching me.

The door opened partway, while I stood there dripping. She was kind enough to block the opening with her body, so I didn’t flash the two young heroes.

She threw a bundle onto the bed. A towel? Clothes?

I started to move towards it and she barked out, “Stop.”

Apparently I wasn’t allowed to dress. She had more things in her hands. A tool kit. She fished out a set of sterile gloves. “Allergies?”

“I’m allergic to bee stings,” I said, trying to inject some levity into the proceedings. I couldn’t see her expression.

Damn it. I was wet, beaded with moisture, my hair clinging to my scalp, and doing my best not to shiver as I cursed the cold air that flooded the room. I used my fingers and fingernails to comb my hair back away from my face.

“Latex allergy?”

“No,” I said, “And I was joking about the bee stings.”

Not even a recognition of the joke. “Are you on any medications?”

“No.”

“Birth control?”

“No.” Condoms, I thought.

“Two ways we can do this. You cooperate, takes five to ten minutes to do a full search. You fail to cooperate, if you fight me, bite or struggle, I step outside and we turn on the countermeasure, and then do a search while you’re incapacitated.”

Her head lifted fractionally, as if she was glancing up at the electricity-dispensing orb above.

“I’ll cooperate,” I said.

Oh, how glad I was, that I could focus my power elsewhere, distract myself.

Tagg had arranged everyone in a conference room upstairs. The heroes, suits and uniforms I presumed were key members of the PRT, and one or two more, who sat a distance away from the Director and his people.

“Plans,” Tagg said, “Go.”

“We bring Defiant and Dragon in,” Miss Militia said. “They ship her to another PRT office where we can hold her until a trial.”

“Sensible,” Tagg said, “Except we expose ourselves to attack while …ing her.”

“We’re vulnerable to attack here,” Miss Militia said.

“We can’t act until we know what she’s doing,” another cape said. A woman with a high collar. Dovetail. “What’s her plan?”

There was a silence.

“Thoughts, Miss Militia?” Tagg asked.

“She’s… intelligent. In every case we’ve crossed paths with her, she’s proved resourceful. She was confident and self-assured when she turned herself in. Whatever this maneuver is, it was calculated.”

“Mrs. Yamada?” Tagg asked one of the people in suits at the far end of the table.

“I’ve read up on her, studied the records you have of her, talked to the students that knew her best, for better or worse. Greg Veder, Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess, Madison Clements… her teachers, her father… I’m not so convinced.”

“You disagree with Miss Militia?”

“I can’t say for sure without talking to the girl, but actual surrender isn’t impossible, given my understanding of her.”

“I’m not saying she’s not surrendering,” Miss Militia said. “I’m saying she’s plotting something. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“She could be attempting to bring down the PRT,” Assault said. “Do it from within. With the charges we have lined up against her, she can request a jury trial. She uses that as a platform to dish out dirty secrets. Confidential data on Armsmaster, details from records they stole from the database, the Echidna event and the fallout therein…”

“Given how that’s gone,” Dovetail said, “She’d be digging her own grave. We all thought the details would leak, but Cauldron’s cleanup is efficient. Anyone who tries to leak details gets… censored.”

“Killed,” Adamant clarified. “Or disappeared.”

“It would be unfortunate if she were killed in our custody,” Tagg said. “She’d be safer in the Birdcage.”

“With the public support she has within the city?” Miss Militia asked. “Good luck getting her there without a fair trial. There’s going to be a lot of eyes on this.”

“So she’s forcing our hand,” Tagg said. “The question is why.”

“To oust you,” Miss Militia said.

“Revenge?” Tagg asked.

“I don’t know, but I had a conversation with her a few days ago, and she said she had something in mind that she could use against you. I didn’t know what it was before now.”

“I see,” Tagg said, rubbing his chin.

Back in the cell, I sighed. I could see the uniform flinch in reaction. She had her fingers in my mouth, feeling beneath my tongue and around the base of my gums. When I didn’t bite like she’d feared, she finished and removed her fingers from my mouth. She removed the gloves, where they joined the first pair she’d donned.

Miss Militia had told Tagg. I wasn’t surprised; she gave me the impression of someone who followed the letter of the law. As willing as she’d been to open negotiations, she would still do what it took to keep her job and maintain the peace.

I was maybe a little disappointed. I hadn’t demanded she keep it a secret, and it wasn’t liable to change anything, but it made for a small breach of faith.

The PRT officer finished off the search by combing my hair with a metal comb that I suspected was sharpened at the points to double as a wood saw. It felt like it, at least. The combing wasn’t done to look tidy, but to search my hair for any foreign matter or tools. I was just glad they hadn’t decided to shave it all off. I wouldn’t have put it past them.

“Towel is in the bag,” the PRT officer said. She shook a plastic bag to open it, then began putting my clothes inside, leaving me only the underwear.

I opened the drawstring bag, which was missing a drawstring, then sorted out the contents. A thin towel, a single sheet so thin it was translucent, a pillow and pillowcase that looked to be the same fabric as the mattress, folded double, half the size of a normal pillow. There were prison sweats, black, with the word ‘Villain’ printed across the shoulders and down the right leg in white, with a white t-shirt with the same word in black. There was a small kit with a rubbery, flexible thimble-toothbrush that fit over one finger and a small tube of toothpaste, three tampons with soap, three cardboard applicators, and three pads.

Not that it mattered. I’d been under enough stress the past few months that I’d missed my periods entirely. I might have panicked, if the timing of it had been different. I was safe. Ninety-nine point nine percent sure I was safe.

She waited until I had quickly toweled dry, put the underwear and prison sweats on, then handed me my glasses and opened the door. I caught a glimpse of Triumph and Clockblocker before she blocked my line of sight.

“Sit tight, princess,” she said.

The door whisked shut, leaving me confined in a space so narrow that I could lay down and touch two opposing walls with toe and outstretched hand. Only the ceiling was out of reach.

I adjusted the sweats, leaving the front open, headed to the bed, laid down the pillow and stretched out.

“…Alcott girl,” Tagg was saying. “Is she here?”

“On her way,” the deputy director answered.

“Then I think it’s time to settle on a game plan,” the Director said. “I’m Skitter’s target, or one of them. …ssination?”

“Coercion,” Miss Militia said.

“I see. Her power extends to the remainder of this building, even now, am I right?”

“Arthropodokinesis, arthropodovoyance,” the Deputy Director said. “She’s on record as a master eight, thinker one. The thinker classification is key here: ex-Director Piggot noted Skitter can see through her bugs’ eyes.”

“Can she lipread?” Tagg asked.

“No idea,” the Deputy Director replied.

“I said it before,” Miss Militia said. Her voice was a fraction quieter than before, but I couldn’t read her tone with the bugs’ hearing. “She’s resourceful. I’d assume she took the time to learn, if it would expand her capabilities.”

Director Tagg nodded slowly, then rubbed his chin again. The movement of his wrist against his armrest nearly killed the bug I had in between his dress shirt and jacket. “Agreed. I already informed each of my officers to treat her as though she had a two point classification in every category, or two points higher in cases where she’s already received scores. Brute two, mover two… all the way down the list. It won’t do to underestimate her. Let’s anticipate that she’s put herself in this position to have full access to the building by way of her power. Until further notice, staff aren’t to access any confidential files, we don’t speak on any private matters while within her reach, capes are to remain masked at all times while on the premises, and we’ll devote all remaining resources to preparing for any conflict.”

Clockblocker and Triumph had entered just as he finished speaking.

“Conflict?” Clockblocker asked. He took a chair among the other Wards.

“It remains a possibility. If her teammates were to attack, she’d be positioned to use her power to hamper us, up until we used the nonlethal measures to incapacitate her,” Tagg replied.

“I could use my power,” Clockblocker said. “Put her on pause, repeat the process until we have other measures in place.”

“No,” Tagg said. “We need you elsewhere, and each contact gives her a chance to act against you or escape. She’s confined, and we can use countermeasures to incapacitate her if need be.”

The Director set his elbows on the table and leaned over, covering his mouth with his hands. I missed some of what he said, as his words were muffled. “And … her stew for a while.”

Ah. So the psychological pressure extended another step. A strip search, a claustrophobic cell, stripping away my possessions, and now he planned to keep me cooped up in here until my composure cracked. Not so effective if I was being put on pause, with only a fraction of the time passing.

“The alternative,” Assault said, “Is that this is exactly what she wants. She wants us to react.”

“It’s possible,” Tagg said. “Getting us agitated, getting media attention, having us call in assistance, only to humiliate us further.”

“You’re bringing in help?” Miss Militia asked.

“We’ll see,” Tagg said. He touched his face as he spoke, and it muddled his words, “In the …, see to the … I recommended in dealing with her. It would be best if you didn’t use your computer, with her … watching-”

“No need. I remember what we discussed,” Miss Militia said. “I’ll arrange it.”

“Make any and all calls outside of her power’s range.”

“We will,” Miss Militia said.

“If she’s … fight a war over the city’s heart, let’s make the first move. We contact the media, control … … they have access to, make sure the first thing the public hears is our side. Make sure we make some mention of Accord, and Hellhound’s penchant for chewing up people who trespass on her territory.”

“I’ll see to it,” the deputy director said.

Odd, to be so utterly helpless while I watched my enemies maneuver against me. I couldn’t, wouldn’t use my power here. I couldn’t talk to them, or request anything.

I shifted position, and the metal bands squeaked. I couldn’t find a position to lie down, and wound up sitting. I toweled my hair ineffectually in an attempt to get it dry.

An officer, out of uniform, appeared at the door to the conference room. “Media already has the story. Vickery, with channel twelve. He’s asking us for final comments before the story goes live.”

“Is he on the phone right now?”

“Yes sir.”

Tagg stood, “Tell him I’ll talk to him when I’m done here, and I’ll make any wait worth his while.”

“Yes sir.”

As the uniform left, Tagg remained standing at the end of the table. “Anticipate confrontation, but don’t seek it out. Whatever they have planned, they’ll want to rescue her.”

“We can seal off the stairwell access with containment foam,” Kid Win spoke up. “Seize the elevator, to prevent access to the cells. If there’s an attack, we shut down the elevator. In the worst case scenario, they can’t get her out before reinforcements arrived from other cities.”

“You can do it fast?” Tagg asked.

“Very,” Kid Win said.

“See to it. Where do things stand with the defense system against the bugs?”

“Not done, but I could wrap it up soonish with Sere’s help, maybe.”

“Sere? You’ll cooperate?”

“Yes,” Sere replied. “Of course.”

“Then it’s settled. Everyone else, double the number of patrols, form pairs at a bare minimum, focus on recon more than fighting. Track the Undersiders, meet with contacts. Consider this a mid-to-high priority situation, keep that in mind if you’ve any favors to call in and you’re weighing whether you should. Miss Militia? Ready the measures we discussed, and use the Wards. We don’t want them in a direct confrontation, and they can fend for themselves if ambushed.”

“Yes sir.”

With that, the meeting was broken up. Tagg headed to his office, the Wards moved to the elevator to head down to their headquarters, below the cell that held me, and the Protectorate headed out on patrols.

My power’s range was about five blocks. It should have been larger, going by the running theory that feeling ‘trapped’ extended my reach, but I was in here by my own device. I couldn’t necessarily force it.

Five blocks felt oppressively small, in the grand scheme of things. I was in a six-foot by six-foot cell with thick walls, nothing to read, no television to watch, and only dull metal and chrome to look at. The vague blur of my reflection in the walls was only a dark shadow, the occasional gleam of light of my glasses.

Around me, the PRT office buzzed like an anthill I’d kicked. People were heading here and there on tasks and missions, reacting, preparing, anticipating some form of attack. The higher-ranking members of the PRT made calls to contacts, prepared, and set security measures in place. PRT uniforms got geared up, off-duty teams were called in and prepared, organized in defensive lines around the building.

Miss Militia, for her part, sent Flechette on an errand, instructing her to make a phone call and return as soon as possible, and then started organizing the Wards.

I set bugs on the minute and hour hands of a clock. It was both a curse and a blessing, because it made me acutely aware of how slowly time was passing.

“Things are going crazy,” Crucible said.

“This is big,” Clockblocker said.

“I’m just saying, you’d think things get calmer when the kingpin- queenpin-“

“Crime lord,” Clockblocker said, “It’s easier.”

“When the crime lord of the city turns themselves in.”

Vista spun around in her chair to face Crucible, “She’s probably planning something like getting put in jail, then breaking out and showing us there’s no point in trying to catch her, because we can’t keep her. And she’ll do it with teeny-weeny bugs, make Tagg look bad, maybe get him fired.”

“Fits,” Clockblocker mused.

“But she can’t know she’ll escape. What if we did have Dragon and Defiant move her halfway across the country?”

“She used my power to cut Echidna in half,” Clockblocker said. “She could deal with that, too.”

“Again with the Echidna thing,” Crucible said. “Can’t you tell-”

“Classified,” Clockblocker, Kid Win and Vista said, at the same time. Kid Win didn’t even look up from the containment foam dispenser he was tinkering with.

“Fuck you guys.”

The screen in my cell flashed yellow, then beeped once, a sound loud enough that it made me jump.

I stood from the bed and walked around until I faced the screen.

It stayed yellow for long seconds, then went dark.

Checking on me?

I sat back down.

The minutes were ticking away. Tagg was counting on this confinement wearing on me. Putting me in a different headspace for when he finally decided to come down and grill me. It… was working, but probably not to the degree he was thinking. Being manhandled by the PRT officer had been another attempt at getting me outside of my comfort zone, no doubt a gambit, where any resistance from me would be met by a shout from Triumph, a beating and a use of Clockblocker’s power before the door was shut in my face. A lack of resistance only making me uncomfortable, putting me in my place, for lack of a better phrase.

But again, it didn’t matter. My concerns were on bigger things, on the space beyond this cell, on everything I needed to achieve.

A family made their way to the lobby. I assumed them to be tourists, until the guards let them into the building. Two adults and a young girl. The Alcotts.

Dinah had cut her hair short.

Reinventing herself? Distancing herself from being Coil’s ‘pet’?

Tagg met them at the end of the lobby, then ushered them upstairs to the conference room. They were joined by Mrs. Yamada, her cousin Triumph, and Miss Militia.

Tagg waited until everyone else was seated before sitting at the head of the table.

He pressed a key, and the monitor in my room beeped. I lay down on the bed before the six seconds were up and the cameras went on.

When he was done looking in on me, he closed the laptop.

“She turned herself in,” Dinah said.

“Your power pick up on that?” Triumph asked.

“We watched the news,” Dinah’s mom said.

“When you said sending Defiant and Dragon into the school would virtually guarantee that Skitter was brought into custody,” Tagg said, and his phrasing was odd, as if he were choosing words carefully or there was a tone my bugs’ hearing wasn’t picking up on, “you didn’t say anything about this.”

I did catch the emphasis on ‘this’ as he finished.

“This?” Dinah’s father asked.

“That she’d surrender, nearly a week later. The timing of it, the fact that it could be a ploy.”

“I didn’t know,” Dinah said.

“If you have an accusation,” Mr. Alcott said, “Say it outright.”

“I’m saying your daughter was helping Skitter, not us. That everything seems to suggest she was aiding and abetting a known criminal.”

“Are you insane?” Mr. Alcott asked. The volume of his voice rose. “Those thoughts don’t even connect!”

“I don’t necessarily agree with the Director’s line of reasoning, Dinah,” Miss Militia said, “But Skitter’s a known criminal mastermind, with an emphasis on the latter. She’s a capable strategist and a battlefield tactician. As far as we were aware, she was well situated as one of the more powerful villains in North America, judging by her control over this city. In the past week alone, she’s … two villainous organizations and folded a third into her own. There’s no reason for her to surrender. The only way any of this makes sense is if there’s a greater plan at work.”

“And you think Dinah had something to do with that plan?” Mrs. Alcott asked.

Mrs. Yamada leaned forward, “It’s very understandable if Dinah feels indebted or attached to Skitter, to Taylor Hebert. She owes her a great deal.”

Dinah mumbled something. I wasn’t sure if it was even a word.

Mrs. Yamada continued, “We’re only trying to make sense of this. Wanting to help someone who’s done a great deal for you isn’t a bad thing, Dinah, understand? But there’s other things going on. Sensitive things. Skitter may unwittingly do a lot of damage or put herself at risk, if she says the wrong things and the wrong people hear.”

“…,” Dinah said something under her breath.

“Beg pardon?” Mrs. Yamada asked.

“Good. If she does a lot of damage, then good.”

Director Tagg started to speak, but Mrs. Yamada cut him off. “Why is that good, Dinah?”

“Can’t say. Won’t say.”

“You are working with her, then,” Tagg said. He shifted position in his chair.

“No. Yes. Both. I’m working for everyone. I don’t think Skitter’s very happy with me, really. But she’s still here, because I told her to be.”

“You’ve been in communication with her?” Miss Militia asked. I could tell how much gentler her voice was than Tagg’s.

“No.”

“Oh my lord,” Tagg said, leaning back in his chair and staring up at the ceiling. “I think I’m about to have an aneurysm.”

Dinah didn’t reply.

“Do you hate the PRT, Dinah?” Miss Militia asked.

“No.”

“Or heroes? Do you blame us for not helping you when you needed it?”

“No. A little, but that’s not important.”

“But you want Skitter to do damage? To hurt us?”

“She’ll do damage, one way or another. If she didn’t come here voluntarily, she probably would have become meaner. It would have turned into a big fight, and she would make a mistake eventually and get brought in. But she decided to surrender, so the same thing happens. I’m glad that happened.”

“All because we revealed her identity,” Yamada said.

“Yes.”

“But we don’t know the ramifications of this ploy of hers,” Miss Militia said.

“I do,” Dinah replied. “But I’m not telling. And I’m charging ten times as much if you ask me for a number, and then I’ll lie, and I won’t be able to use my power for a while after. And your bosses don’t want that. Not with an Endbringer coming soon.”

“You’ll charge us for a number you won’t provide?” Tagg asked.

“Yes. Because I charge you for asking. I can’t help but look for the numbers, so I have to look. And that makes my head hurt if I do it too much.”

Tagg let his hand drop to the table with enough force to make a noise and make the lid of the laptop in front of him clatter.

“Why, Dinah?” Miss Militia asked. “Why do this?”

“For everyone. Because we got this far, it makes the numbers a little better. Whatever happens from here on out, it makes the end of the world a little less bad.”

“A little less bad,” Triumph echoed her.

“But it still happens,” Tagg said.

“Almost always. The world ends, in two years or in fifteen or sixteen.”

Tagg opened his laptop, “Do you have anything to say to Skitter?”

“No,” Dinah said. “I’m done.”

“Done.”

“Yes. I’m busy. It’s only because my cousin works here that I even came.”

“You seem to be playing a dangerous game,” Tagg said, “Testing our goodwill, manipulating us for your own ends.”

“Everyone’s ends, and I didn’t manipulate you. You asked for a number, I gave it.”

He ignored her. “Helping her when you should be helping us.”

“I don’t have to help you,” she said. “I’m not a good guy. I’m not a bad guy. I’m done working for other people, answering their questions when I don’t want to. I work for me, and for everyone.”

Odd, to think how much time I’d dedicated to Dinah, and how little I really knew her. There was this, only now, and the discussions we had prior to me taking her home. So little.

Tagg was rubbing his temples. “Fine. Now, when you said that the outcome of this improves the numbers, I understand that includes sending her to the Birdcage?”

“When I said I was done, I meant it,” Dinah said. She pushed her chair back. Her parents joined her, standing. “You want more answers, get in contact with my dad, he’ll let you know my rates. They change every day.”

“Not a wise business decision for a rogue starting out,” Tagg said, without rising from his chair. “Offending an organization like the PRT, a young lady like you mouthing off. We could cooperate, instead.”

He was threatening her? I clenched a fist.

Dinah looked back at him. “I don’t think you have any conception how valuable my answers are. I could answer one question a week for people in Asia and I’d be set for life. I don’t care if I offend you.”

“And you don’t care about your savior, locked away in that cell?” Tagg asked.

Dinah stopped in her tracks. “Are you threatening Taylor?”

“I don’t know,” the Director said. “You said she’ll do damage in some form. Maybe we need to stop that from happening. And you said that no matter what happens, the outcome’s more in our favor than it was before she surrendered. Why? Is it that important to remove her from Brockton Bay? To unseat her from her throne?”

“I’m not answering any more questions.”

“You’ll answer what I ask you to answer,” Tagg said, “Because we need to go into this with our eyes open. We can’t have Skitter damage us.”

“Director,” Mrs. Yamada said, “This isn’t constructive. The last thing she wants-”

“The last thing I want is another arrogant dickface telling me what to do,” Dinah said. “You want answers, Director? Fine. Twenty two point eight one three percent chance you die painfully, over long, slow minutes or hours. Maybe soon, maybe in twenty years, but it’ll bring you to tears, and you’ll wail in pain. That’s a freebie. Want more details?”

“Guys,” Miss Militia said.

“You assume I care about that,” the Director said.

“You will.”

“Guys,” Miss Militia said, louder.

“If you refuse to give us assistance, and people get hurt, then that’s on your head,” Director Tagg said.

“I deal with that every day,” Dinah said. “I’ll cope.”

“Guys!” Miss Militia stood from her chair, the feet screeching against the ground. She raised her voice another notch. “Look.”

She pointed at the window.

I moved my bugs to check for whatever it was she was pointing at, then stopped.

She was pointing at the bugs. They’d reacted to my irritation, and were swirling just beyond the window of the conference room, clustering on the glass surface.

“Is she making a move?” Tagg asked.

“No. They’re… just there. Reacting,” Miss Militia said. “To this. Here.”

“She’s watching,” Tagg said.

“Watching what? There’s nothing to look at,” Miss Militia said. “Think about it. What this is to her.”

“She hears,” Mrs. Yamada finished the thought.

I shut my eyes, swore under my breath. I’d let my guard down. I’d been too focused on what was going on inside the building, letting bugs cluster on the outside, that I’d given my reactions away. So much for gathering intel.

Tagg faced the window, no doubt staring at it, at the bugs.

“Arthropodaudience,” Miss Militia said. “She’s fully aware of everything that’s been going on in this building.”

“I’m gone,” Dinah said. “I can’t communicate with her or the numbers change. I’ll be letting the PRT know you pissed me off. They can expect prices to go up five percent from here on out.”

With that, Dinah was gone, saying something to her parents that I couldn’t make out.

My focus was more on Tagg.

“So,” he said, his voice low, “You can hear me.”

“Yes,” my bugs replied, speaking throughout the building. They were distributed evenly enough that it would barely be audible. A thin, almost imperceptible sound. More than a few people jumped in reaction to it.

“I see,” the Director said. “You tipped your hand.”

I didn’t have a response to that. I had.

He turned to Miss Militia. “See that Kid Win gets the defense system online sooner than later. I’d like this building cleared of bugs.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“And you,” the Director said. I was getting used to his voice. I caught the emphasis there. “You stay put and be good.”

I shifted position, sitting on the end of the bed, elbows on my knees, staring at the floor.

Waiting, listening, watching.

Another twenty minutes, forty minutes, sixty minutes passing, with irregular check-ins by way of the monitor. Every member of the PRT was set in place, some near the PRT headquarters, others elsewhere in the city. Heroes went on patrol and came back, making short trips, no longer than half an hour each. Each hero in a pairing took turns reporting to Tagg.

Rachel had been seen crossing the city earlier, as had Grue. A meeting at the Forsberg Gallery. If they were following Tagg’s orders, there was now a PRT wagon stationed nearby, ready with a containment foam turret, in case the villains decided to meet there again.

Miss Militia got a list of phone calls to make from Tagg, then left, exiting my range.

Another half hour. Another check-in, a group of four heroes teleported in, Miss Militia returned and whispered back and forth with Tagg. There was a long discussion between the new heroes, Assault, Miss Militia and Tagg about how concentrated the forces were, now. Too many PRT uniforms and heroes in one place, the danger if they were all wiped out.

In a matter of minutes, they’d organized another distribution. Expanding control over the area, keeping two major groups out of my reach.

Only five minutes after the groups had departed, Kid Win activated his system. Floating drones started to roam the PRT headquarters, each no larger than a toaster, each with multiple settings that they rotated between. They emulated Sere’s power on a low enough level to kill bugs in the area without doing undue harm to any people, then became laser turrets, firing an invisible beam every second for about a minute, killing a bug with each shot. Then they shifted focus and accelerated, veering to a different location with unpredictable trajectories.

Kid Win was making more, too. He was joined by one of the heroes that had just arrived. Another tinker. I caught a snippet of what they were talking about before the next drone kicked to life and killed the bugs I had on the new arrival. Workshop talk. Improving designs.

Damn tinkers.

Avoiding the drones became something of a game, occupying my attention to the point that I was still able to keep tabs on a few important people, but I was badly limited in terms of my ability to listen in. Fifteen minutes passed without me seeing or hearing anything significant. The monitor flared yellow for another check-in. Two minutes later, there was another. Irregular, unpredictable.

As a plus, Tagg seemed to be getting restless, if the movements of his blurry form within his office were any indication. He’d arranged his forces, and the only thing he could do now was wait.

We were both waiting. Both biding our time in the hopes that the other would crack first, make the first move and initiate conversation.

Miss Militia left to make another batch of calls outside my range. She returned sooner than before, made a beeline straight for Tagg, and exchanged a few more whispered words.

Together, they made their way to the elevator. The Protectorate tinker that had just arrived was sealing off the staircase, and there was only one way down.

As a pair, Miss Militia and Tagg walked down the length of the hallway, stopping outside of my cell. I combed my hair out of my face, squared my shoulders and faced the door.

The screen turned red. A matter of seconds later, the doors slid open.

“Flechette?” Miss Militia asked.

Flechette? Had my allies done something?

“Did you plan this?” Miss Militia asked.

I elected not to answer. This was a small victory, no matter what they were referring to. Tagg had broken first, had come to me more on my terms than his. I was going to play it for everything it was worth.

I met Tagg’s glare with a level stare of my own.

“If you used Regent to make this happen-” Miss Militia said.

Regent?

“Not Regent,” I said. I hope it’s not Regent.

“You’re admitting you planned her defection, then?”

Defection? I thought of Parian.

“I… left the door open for it to happen,” I said. True, though not nearly to the extent I was implying.

“And this plays a role in your greater plan?” Miss Militia asked. She was doing all the talking, here. It seemed Tagg didn’t want to break the silence.

I thought for a second. “Consider it symbolic.”

“Of?”

I smiled a little, then shrugged.

That seemed to be the point where Tagg lost his cool. He didn’t get angry. Instead, he merely said, “Interrogation room B.”

Miss Militia held a pair of ordinary handcuffs in one hand, a taser in the other. I turned and extended my hands behind me, and she set the handcuffs in place, holding my arm as she led me down the length of the hall, around the corner and into a large room with only a table, a chair, and more sheet metal covering everything.

“One o’clock,” I said, when I’d taken my seat. Miss Militia was unclipping my cuffs, moving my hands around in front of me to slip them through the reinforced table.

“I think it’s about one,” Miss Militia said.

“Exactly one,” I said.

“Is the time important?” she stepped away from the table.

“Her friends will move to attack at a set time,” Tagg said. “She won’t share that time, because she wants us to squirm, to be on high alert.”

“Eight thirty,” I said. “Sunset.”

I could see his heavy eyebrows rise in mild surprise.

“You planned something for eight-thirty?”

“No,” I said. I smiled a little, looking down at the table. “I didn’t plan anything. I didn’t say goodbye. I walked away, and I turned myself in.”

“You’re acting like that’s something special,” Tagg said, leaning against the wall by the door, his arms folded.

“The only instruction I gave was to Tattletale, to hold the others back until sunset, and to give them direction when they do act. They’ll have time to get angry in the meantime. They’ll be mad at me, but they’ll take it out on you. You have to understand, even at my worst, even when I’m as mad as I was the other night, when you’d outed me, I was sensible, reasonable in terms of how I dealt with you and held back. Now you get to see how unreasonable the rest of the Undersiders can be, without me to rein them in.”

“I thought this might be it. A lesson in the role you play here. Leading us to think that we need you,” Tagg said, “To keep them in line.”

“That’s not it,” I said.

“No?”

“It’s not even secondary, in terms of what I’m looking to achieve. I don’t think I could go back to them and return to my position if I wanted to. And I don’t.”

“Then what?” he asked.

“It’s a time limit. You saw what we were willing to do to Butcher, to Valefor. Even with that, even there, we were holding back as a group. Trust me when I say that I know my friends. If you stand between them and me? If you hurt me? They’re going to go thermonuclear on you. On the PRT as a whole. Tattletale will make sure of it. She’ll keep them on target, guide them, and maximize the damage. She’ll do most of the damage.”

“You said you weren’t going to do any harm to the PRT,” Miss Militia said.

“If things go that way,” I said, “It’s because the PRT is hurting the PRT. Which wouldn’t be an isolated incident.”

“Cute,” Tagg said.

I met his eyes. “I’m just saying. It’s really up to you guys. Send me to the Birdcage, you lose everything. Things get ugly for the PRT at a critical point in time. I suffer, the Undersiders suffer, you suffer, the world suffers.”

I stopped, watching him for any sign of doubt, for a waver in his eyes, for a change in his expression or posture. His poker face was good.

Miss Militia shifted position, but didn’t speak.

“Or?” Tagg finally asked.

“Or you let me call my lawyer, and then you hear my demands,” I said.

“Demands?” he growled the word.

“Demands. I have several conditions you guys will have to meet before I capitulate. I’ll bow my head, appear in public, plea bargain, do whatever you want. You get me, wholesale, no contest, and no complications. The PRT gets a victory at a point in time when, like I said, it’s most vulnerable.”

I studied his expression, then looked at Miss Militia.

“It’s your choice. You won’t like my demands. They call for big changes. But the alternative is an all-out war. I think Miss Militia will agree with me here, if the PRT doesn’t hear me out, it deserves what it gets.”

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Interlude 21

Posted on April 30, 2013 by wildbow

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How did the others do it? They entered into a room and people respected them.

Sabah walked through her territory, a black, bipedal unicorn just behind her. She had muscle, but the stares she got were hard ones, challenging.

Was it that she’d inherited territory that Bitch had controlled, once? Territory where people had been afraid to go outside for fear of being attacked by dogs? She’d tried to make it clear she wasn’t that kind of leader, had tried to emulate Skitter, even, but it hadn’t worked. Gifts she’d brought in were rejected outright, or taken wordlessly, as if people thought she owed them something for being in charge. She’d saved people from the Teeth… saved them from extortion, threats.

Not even a thank-you.

She couldn’t shake the suspicion that, well, she hadn’t been here when the disasters hit Brockton Bay. She hadn’t been a line of defense between these people and the Slaughterhouse Nine, the Merchants, the Chosen, or the Pure.

She’d been one of those people, instead. She’d escaped being the victim, but… she’d lost so many people she cared about.

It wasn’t the first time she’d done this. Gravitating towards one idea, feeling like she’d finally found the one thing she had to do. It was never easy. Always an uphill climb.

High school had been hard because she’d immigrated from Basra with her family. She’d had an incomplete understanding of English, had been forced to learn the language as she learned the subject matter. Her parents had been too occupied with their own issues and their own adjustment to help her out, so she’d done it alone.

Sabah was still kind of proud that she’d managed it, even if it wasn’t something that anyone else had ever recognized. A private, personal victory.

She’d attended university, and had gravitated towards the grittier subjects. She’d taken math courses, focusing on engineering after her first year, because they had been the subjects she’d found easiest in her transition to an English high school. She’d been okay with it, not happy but not miserable, but still, she hadn’t had a person to confide in. She’d stuck it out on her own, quietly uncomfortable with where she was in every sense of the word, unwilling to burden her family with her relatively minor issues.

Being a girl in a male-dominated field, she’d drawn attention from one student. A boy. He’d been nice, but he’d also been under the impression that being nice demanded reciprocation, as though every action deserved an equal and appropriate reaction from her.

He was always there. They had the same classes, because they were in the same program, barely twenty-five of them in all, and Brockton Bay’s college wasn’t that big. He was always interested in talking to her, and her more demure rejections had had no effect.

She tried a clear ‘no’, and it didn’t work. He’d gone away for a few days, then came back, making another casual hint about them maybe going out.

She tried a harsh no, laced with all the anger and frustration she’d been feeling, and she got labeled a ‘bitch’. The other students, friends or acquaintances of her would-be-paramour, wound up hearing and turned on her. Her schoolwork started to suffer, because she didn’t have the study groups, nobody willing to work with her on projects and presentations.

So, after six weeks of that, she’d caved. She told him she’d had a bad day, apologized for her attitude. She’d hated herself for doing it.

It only served to put her right back where she’d been before, dreading going to class and dealing with him. Always with that vague fear that he’d escalate, that he’d start sending her emails or phoning her.

And because of the way she’d done it, she’d burned a bridge. She couldn’t defuse the relationship with a statement to the effect of, ‘I don’t like boys.’ He would have seen it as another manipulation, and she couldn’t have managed if she were cut off again.

Her father’s terminal heart attack had been another straw on the camel’s back. Alone, it was nothing, but in combination with everything else… Sabah had triggered on what was only one in a long string of nights spent alone, stewing in frustration, fear and anger in her dorm room. She’d glimpsed something bigger, something that was beyond her recall now, and she’d gained her powers.

That had been the push she’d needed to walk away from the boy and the engineering program. She’d found a new goal. Success in fashion design. As far away from engineering as she could get. Her mom had been disappointed, but she’d felt like she maybe had a direction. She’d made friends. Even moved out of a coveted single-bed dorm room to a double to socialize more.

It hadn’t lasted long, that motivation. Even before Leviathan came and dashed the college to pieces, she’d had doubts about whether it was what she was meant to do.

Even before the Slaughterhouse Nine had killed her mom, her aunt, her cousin, and her roommate, she’d been feeling hopeless, desperate.

She’d taken Skitter’s offer, hoping that maybe, this time, it would be different. That maybe, if it was something she needed to do, rather than something she wanted, she’d find that direction, find that focus.

She hadn’t. From beginning to end, it had felt as hollow as each of the earlier ventures.

Sabah made her way to her headquarters, her atelier, and she couldn’t help but notice the way people stared, or the way they didn’t show her the respect that Skitter seemed to naturally accept and respond to.

She hadn’t been here when it counted. Now they were moving on, and she was rudderless once again.

Always an uphill climb.

She’d just reached her atelier when her phone rang. A text.

Flechette:
Skitter showed up at PRT office and turned self in. They taking her to cell right now.

She had to reread it to make sure she wasn’t getting the wrong impression. Skitter… The ramifications of this… The… What?

Before she could even wrap her head around the subject, there was another text.

Flechette:
You know anything about this?

The heroes seemed as confused about this as Sabah was.

Parian:
Nothing.

She found Tattletale on the contact list, tried calling.

A busy signal.

A text instead?

Parian:Tt skitter just surrendered to heroes

The reply was almost immediate:

Tt:I know. come 2 meet place from other nite asap. First floor.

No answers, no information, only an order to meet up.

The unicorn wouldn’t do, put together like it was. It had to be deconstructed, repurposed.

Her power gave her fine control with lightweight materials. That wasn’t a problem. Threads unwound, seams coming undone.

But her control of larger things was an entirely different beast. Her telekinesis fell apart when she tried to move anything heavier than a half-pound or so, her dexterity and speed in moving those objects that much slower. Worse, her telekinesis exploded, and not even in a constructive manner. It got more and more unstable as she tried to move larger things, until it simply… expanded, dissipated over an area in an attempt to extend control to a multitude of tiny, lightweight objects.

She began reconstructing the unicorn into a quadruped.

She’d experimented, after getting her power. Found that she could contain the telekinesis and keep it from dissipating. It hadn’t been constructive until she started working with more flexible materials. Porous materials worked best, because her telekinesis could soak into them, through them, and allow her to move the fabric rather than just the material within. The gaps in the fabric allowed her to feed power into the ‘shell’ without it building to critical mass and collapsing. Cloth worked best. Torn or ripped seams could be mended, any other damage proved easily fixable, compared to the issues sturdier material posed. It was plentiful, cheap, and effective. Cloth was her ideal material.

And once the construction was formed, a shell that trapped the telekinetic energy within until it was heavy, she could move it as a collective whole.

The unicorn, at her bidding, bent down to allow her to climb onto its back. Once she was securely in place, belted onto the cloth animal for security, it took off.

There was no instinct here. It was all forced, all clumsily hobbled together with a power that probably wasn’t intended for this use. If powers even had an intent backing them up.

As such, it took time to find the unicorn’s stride. She had to watch where it put its ‘hooves’, fashioned of work gloves and the scraps of rubber boots. She could feel with her power, where it was, but she couldn’t see through its eyes, and any coordination it possessed was limited to what she could give it from her current position.

She wasn’t good at this. Navigating the streets, where they were congested with cars, or making her way through the areas where there was construction, littered with obstacles and pitfalls. At being a cape, at being an important cape.

The Forsberg Gallery appeared, and she ducked off to one side to deconstruct the unicorn.

The material formed two smaller creations, for a smaller profile, and for some muscle to move a barricade meant to keep bystanders out of the construction area around the gallery.

Tattletale, Regent and Imp were already there when she arrived, along with two of Tattletale’s soldiers and one of Regent’s underlings. A television was hooked up, standing in the center of the room.

“…not yet confirmed, but sources suggest that the supervillain is within a containment cell, as authorities convene to discuss…”

Parian glanced at Tattletale, who was sitting on the stairs, head hanging. She was wearing full-coverage sunglasses over her mask. Solemn, staring at the ground, or just resting, with her eyes closed.

“Any details?” Parian asked.

“No,” Regent said. “Nothing but the obvious.”

Grue entered, and he was a storm of darkness, to the point that his body wasn’t even visible.

“Hey, big brother,” Imp said. There was a notable, very deliberate pause. “How’re you doing?”

“I should have known. Should have put it together,” he growled the words in that voice of his that made Parian’s hair stand on end. He turned to Tattletale, “Did you know about this?”

“Power’s out of commission,” she said. “Still have a headache. Keep voices down, please.”

He didn’t reply, turning his attention to the TV.

“I can’t help but note you didn’t answer the question,” Regent told Tattletale. “Did you know?”

Grue turned back to look at her.

“Had an idea.”

“Yes, then.”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Grue asked. “Why keep it a secret? Why is she doing this?”

“I kept it a secret because she asked me to and she’s doing this because she thinks it’s going to fix more things than it breaks,” Tattletale said. She shifted position with care, as though every movement was painful. Even after she stopped, Parian could see her clenching her jaw, as if staving off waves of pain.

“Remains to be seen,” Grue said. “Why didn’t she discuss this with us?”

It was Regent who replied, “She thought we’d convince her it was a bad idea.”

“That’s not a convincing reason,” Grue answered.

This is the team, Parian thought. Skitter was always at the core of it, a group forged by innumerable challenges, each trusting the others to have their backs as they risked life and limb. And she just betrayed that trust.

“There’s two major issues we have to deal with,” Tattletale said. “Accord is going to be one. The other is-

Bitch.

The girl entered the room, two large dogs flanking her, the wolf cub trailing behind, unmodified by her powers. The young American bulldog, still not fully grown, an older pitbull that bore the scars of old dogfights. The wolf cub was comparatively small. Adorable. Adorable and capable of turning into a murder machine the size of a pony.

Bitch was imposing in an entirely different way than Grue was. Grue was intimidating, but he was fair. Rational. Bitch wasn’t either of those things. Her blond hair was shaggy, having grown in, combed with little more than fingers, if appearance was any indication. The glimpses of her face that showed in the midst of the hair were a wary glower.

The girl had her jacket slung over one shoulder, otherwise wearing a simple white sleeveless undershirt with no bra. She was muscular, but she had to be to control the dogs when they were growing, to exert enough strength to get them to turn their heads or change direction. Other parts of her bore similar signs of her day-to-day activities. Her knuckles were scraped and raw, and she had a scratch on one cheekbone, taped shut. The chain that attached to the pitbull’s collar was wound around one arm. She was beaded with sweat, likely due to the exertion of the ride coupled with the heavier pants and boots she wore.

I hate being short, Parian thought. To look at them, few people would have guessed there was a four-year difference in ages. Or they would have guessed the difference in ages went the other way.

Primal, unpredictable, dangerous. Bitch was imposing for those reasons, and because she was emotional. She could and would lash out with physical violence if provoked. Even if she imagined that someone was provoking her. If she was really provoked, she wouldn’t move a muscle, which was worse. She’d whistle and set her dogs on anyone that crossed her.

Parian felt her heart rate pick up as Bitch approached, felt that sense of danger peak as they briefly made eye contact, before the girl moved on.

As unfriendly as the girl was, Bentley was friendly, the young bulldog nudging Parian’s hand for a scratch before hurrying to catch up to his master.

Regent turned off the TV. Bitch stood there, turning to look at each of her teammates in turn.

“What?”

“Christ,” Grue muttered. “Tattletale. You didn’t tell her?”

“Tell me what?” Bitch asked. She glanced around. “Where’s Skitter?”

Nobody volunteered an answer.

“Is she hurt?” Bitch asked. She didn’t even sound concerned. When nobody spoke up, she expanded her question. “Is she dead?”

“Fuck it,” Regent said, “I’ll say it. Skitter’s at the PRT headquarters.”

“So? We break her out.”

“She went there on purpose,” Regent said, almost offhandedly. Carelessly.

Parian couldn’t help but notice the way Bitch clenched her hands, one gripping the metal chain until her knuckles went white.

“Regent,” Grue said.

“What? You don’t want to deliver the news, you don’t get a say in how it’s presented,” Regent retorted.

Bentley and the wolf cub both planted their feet further apart, while the pitbull was looking around, all of a sudden.

There. Bentley’s shoulders were bulging slightly. Bitch was using her powers.

“So?” Bitch asked.

“So… that’s it. That’s why we’re here,” Regent said. “We’re here to talk about this, to plan.”

“She’ll be back,” Bitch said.

Will she? Parian couldn’t help but wonder.

“I’m not so sure,” Grue said, echoing Parian’s thoughts.

“She makes plans,” Bitch said. “She’s smart like that. I’m not. I don’t try to understand what she’s doing.”

“She paid me a visit,” Grue said. “I didn’t realize it until I got the call from Tattletale. She was saying goodbye. Not out loud, but… checking I was okay, making sure I’d be able to manage… after she was gone.”

Bentley was still growing. His flesh split at the shoulder, and he brought one back leg up, kicking at the air as if he had an itch he wanted to reach but couldn’t.

The pitbull and wolf puppy were growing too. The pitbull looked a lot less comfortable with the process than the other animals, more alarmed. Bitch tugged the chain absently to keep him in line.

“She visited us too,” Regent said. “Imp and me.”

“Me too,” Tattletale spoke from her perch on the stairs, quiet.

Not me, Parian thought. Unless I count that meeting with Miss Militia and Lily.

That served the same purposes, didn’t it? Getting things settled? Making sure things would be okay in the future. Ensuring the heroes could help out with my territory?

Parian felt a sinking feeling in her gut. Skitter hadn’t been leaving for the short-term.

And that sinking feeling couldn’t even compare to what the others were feeling, here.

Tattletale, nearly incapacitated. Grue, with his darkness a virtual storm around him. Regent and Imp, standing back, together. And Bitch. Stock still, radiating something more than tension. Restrained aggression, even.

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Bitch said.

“It’s telling,” Grue said. “She was saying goodbye.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Bitch said, and her voice was harder. “It’s a plan.”

Why am I even here? The thought struck Parian, out of place, out of time, a non-sequitur, yet somehow profound. As if this point, in the middle of the discussion, was when she realized how out of place she was in the dynamic.

“Of course it’s a plan,” Regent was saying. “It might not be a good plan-”

Bitch cut him off. “She goes there, she defeats them, and then she comes back.”

“Um,” Imp said. “Why wouldn’t she tell us?”

“She’ll have a reason,” Bitch said.

Loyalty, Parian thought. Misguided loyalty, blinding Bitch to the truth, but loyalty nonetheless.

“Look, it’s not important,” Tattletale said.

“It’s important,” Bitch growled. “You’re supposed to be her friends, and you’re talking about her like she’s gone.”

The pitbull seemed to take her cue, and began growling steadily. He was still growing, his body straining against the chain harness he wore.

“She’s not gone for sure,” Tattletale said. “We don’t know how this is going to play out, not exactly.”

Bitch didn’t seem the least bit satisfied with that, but the pitbull stopped growling. Had she stopped using her power?

“What do we know?” Regent asked.

“That she wanted to keep us in the dark,” Tattletale said. “That she wanted to go…”

“And she planned to be gone long time,” Grue said. “She was asking me about leadership, about whether I was ready to take the reins. I said no, but she did it anyways.”

“She thought this was important,” Tattletale said. “Enough to put you out of your depth, as much as you don’t want it, as much as she didn’t want it for you.”

I don’t even figure into this, Parian thought. I’m not even sure I’m an official member of the group.

“So I’m leader in the interim,” Grue said. There was a note of something in his voice, behind that haunting echo that his power laced it with. Not as severe as despair, bigger than unhappiness. Defeat?

“…Unless there’s any objections,” he said.

Hopeful?

Nobody voiced any.

“Then we run damage control,” Grue said. “Her territory?”

“We can fold it into adjacent territories,” Tattletale said. “Parian, Grue, me. Maybe the others take over some of our territories to give us an easier job of it. She made other arrangements, with her residents. I can contact them so we can discuss it, put it all into action.”

“Her people aren’t a big priority,” Grue said. “If they’re not going to riot, let’s put them on the backburner. I’m more worried about anything that could go up in flames in the next hour.”

“Literally,” Regent said.

“…Possibly literally,” Grue said. “Accord?”

“I called him just after Regent and Imp showed,” Tattletale said. “He’ll be here at nine thirty, on the dot. Would have mentioned sooner, but we got caught up in talking.”

Grue nodded, glancing back towards the TV. Parian did the same. A number blinked on the box beneath the screen: nine twenty-six. “That doesn’t give us much time to organize.”

“The longer we wait, the more upset he’ll be,” Tattletale said. “And he’s a planner. If we give him time, he’ll work out some scheme to retaliate against us. We’re stronger against him if he’s on his toes.”

“Granted,” Grue said. He sighed, “God, I’m not up to this. Damn her to hell.”

There was no reply from the group.

How many members of this group were voicing silent agreement? Parian shifted her weight nervously. How many people here had taken a life? All of them? Most?

Parian couldn’t help but feel out of her depth. The terminology had never felt so apt, feeling like she was in the water, at that one point where she realized she couldn’t reach safety, the water around her face…

She felt like that now, here.

Taylor had been undercover once, hadn’t she? She’d immersed herself in this. It was impossible to imagine.

“Accord,” Tattletale said.

Parian thought at first that Tattletale was returning the group to the topic of conversation, but Tattletale was taking off her glasses, grimacing.

“Undersiders,” Accord said.

“You’re early,” Tattletale said.

“Rest assured, I’m on time.”

“The clock-”

“Is slow,” Accord said. “I arrived when I said I did, and I’ll ask you once to please stop suggesting otherwise.”

If Bitch was an ‘I’ll punch your face in for no reason’ kind of intimidating, and Grue was an ‘I’ll explain carefully just why I’m about to punch your face in’ intimidating, Accord was something else entirely.

It was really easy to imagine him nonchalantly standing above her while she stood in a pit he’d had dug out, a cement truck slowly filling in the space around her. Or very politely eating someone’s severed leg with a knife and fork held in the proper manner.

He was the kind of scary guy they made movies about, only he was real.

And that made her think about the Slaughterhouse Nine.

She hated him. She understood everything about why the Undersiders were working with him, understood that they’d be at the mercy of others like the Slaughterhouse Nine if they didn’t have muscle like his on their side, but she hated him.

He was her height, dressed in a white business suit and tie, his intricate wood-and-silver mask moving to replicate the expressions beneath.

He was joined by his Ambassadors. Each wore a finished mask, a suit for the men and a dress for the ladies: Citrine in yellow, with gemstones; Othello in alabaster white and jet black, all stark contrasts; Ligeia in a deep blue-green that contrasted her dark skin, with a conch-shell mask that swept back over the corner of her forehead, with an ‘up’ hairstyle to match; Jacklight, with a deep royal purple dress shirt and pocket square, his mask a grinning visage that would be fitting for a child’s jack-in-the-box; and Lizardtail, bigger than the others, with a green dress shirt and pocket square, an ornate mask that looked more like a Celtic knot than anything lizardlike. Maybe the segments or spiral of it were supposed to represent a cut tail?

He’d arrived with firepower, in short. Parian didn’t consider herself very combat-savvy, but she was aware of that much.

“I… rather dislike surprises,” Accord said.

“You and me both, pal,” Tattletale replied.

It wasn’t… it didn’t seem like a smart way to talk to the perfectionist supervillain. Accord was dangerous, so why was Tattletale provoking him?

It seemed to take Accord a second to compose himself and get his thoughts in order. “It would be polite to stand, when a guest arrives.”

“Feeling a bit under the weather,” Tattletale said. “Forgive my bad manners. I take it you caught the essentials on TV?”

“On the radio, while we drove,” Accord said. “Did you know of this scheme?”

“Of course,” Tattletale said. “Do you think we’re crazy? Everything’s golden.”

“Golden,” Accord said.

“Copacetic, peachy keen.”

“I wasn’t informed of any plans.”

“You don’t have to be,” Tattletale said.

“We’re allies.”

“You’re subordinate to us,” Tattletale said. “If you have an issue with that, I urge you to submit a written complaint and formally declare war. Twenty four hours notice, if you please. I know you like rules and regulations.”

“You’re mocking me.”

“Yes. And you’re letting me mock you for some reason. You’re making a lot of concessions in our bargain here. You have a reason to be doing that,” Tattletale said. “I’m comfortable leveraging that.”

“I made concessions because I was led to believe that Skitter was going to be the one in charge of matters here. I investigated her, I met her in person, and I decided she fit the necessary qualifications. Now I’m finding that things are definitely not what they appeared to be. She’s not in charge, for one thing, there’s the reckless attack against the Teeth that saw one of my very expensive recruits killed…”

“You don’t really care about that,” Tattletale said. “You wanted to wean out the ones who couldn’t cut it. Codex couldn’t cut it. Good at administration, fantastic cook, skilled when it came to managing people, and could even spar, sure, but she didn’t have the wits about her in a combat situation. Couldn’t switch gears.”

He closed his eyes, and metal shutters flicked into place as the mask mimicked the movement. “Please don’t interrupt me.”

“I don’t think you’re getting my point. I don’t bend to your rules, Accord. If you want to talk about your dead underling, let’s talk.”

“She was shot in the throat from behind.”

“Are you saying I’m wrong?” Tattletale asked. “About her being poorly equipped for cape life?”

“No. The analysis is right. I won’t disagree. But I have other concerns. This business with how you murdered Butcher. The girl at the bottom of the Boat Graveyard… Cherish… it was a risky decision.”

“Not so risky when you’ve done a read on the situation. I had all the notes on Butcher Fourteen. She couldn’t teleport free, not into open water. She still can’t, and I had a crew use a remote control device to lash a cable to Butcher Fifteen’s pod. They’ve dropped her into a deeper area of the ocean, and the only thing she’ll be likely to kill are fish. If we’re lucky, maybe Leviathan will float that way and off himself.”

“It was risky nonetheless. There was no assurance the plan would work.”

“And we shouldered that risk. Bitch and Skitter, specifically. If it didn’t work out, it was their lives on the line.”

“And now we have Skitter taking another risk. This seems to be a pattern.”

“She’s taking the risk on our behalf,” Tattletale said. “But that’s not your concern.”

“It’s very concerning to me.”

“But it’s not your concern,” Tattletale said. There was a strain in her voice, and her fingernails were digging into her costume-covered thighs. “We aren’t partners, Accord. Let’s get that straight. Do we work together? Yes. Have we arranged a division of labor? Yes. But this is our city, and you’re renting a space.”

“Tenants have rights when interacting with their landlords,” Accord said.

“Rights, yes. But we’re supervillains. Don’t forget that,” Tattletale relied. “It’s our prerogative to be assholes. And right now? I’m going to be an asshole. The contract stands. Your provisions stand.”

“There’s an escape clause.”

“And you’re free to use it,” Tattletale said. “Take the clause, leave, abandon the investments you’ve already made in this city…”

“Or attack,” Accord said, “And seize everything you have.”

“Or attack,” Tattletale said. She sounded more tired than upset. “You could do that. Or you can take my offer.”

“Which is?”

“Skitter provided your notes on managing crime in Brockton Bay. I don’t think either of us can agree to implement it, without knowing the exact outcome of Skitter’s expedition…”

“I agree,” Accord said. His interest was clearly piqued. Parian could see the way the eyebrows of his mask had raised a fraction.

“But I like it,” Tattletale said. “And if your concern is about instability within this city, I can read your work, see the solutions you propose and consider implementing them. We would give you a hand in shaping policy beyond this group.”

“You’d agree to a contract where you implement a set number of my plans?”

“Hellll no,” Tattletale said.

Parian felt her heart skip a beat. She could see Accord bristle, and his Ambassadors had tensed, as if expecting an order to attack at any second.

“But,” Tattletale said, “I can consider them. And that might be the best offer you’d ever get. You know your ideas are good ones. You know there are ideas that would be worth implementing. If I agreed to read through them, bring the better points up for discussion within the group, across our entire alliance, and I’m hoping we recruit more than just you… well, there’s a chance they’d see the light of day.”

Accord frowned. “You’re not promising anything concrete.”

“No. I am sticking to the deal we arranged. This is a bonus. It doesn’t have to be big. It’s fucking generous as it stands.”

“Please be more civil,” Accord said. “I’d rather you didn’t swear.”

“And I’d rather you didn’t storm in here and act like you were personally offended by our particular way of doing things,” Tattletale said. “I’ve offered you a fucking nice deal. Are you fucking interested?”

“Tattletale,” Grue said. “Enough. I think he gets the point.”

“You’re in charge, then, Grue?” Accord asked.

There was a pause. “Yes. But I’m standing by what Tattletale said.”

“I’ll have to content myself with that, and I’ll give my answer to you, as one team leader to another. I hope to continue working with the Undersiders, and I very much hope that things don’t degenerate any further, as they have with the situation at the PRT offices right now.”

“There’ll be enemies,” Grue said.

“Yes. But there won’t be further disturbances? Nothing further that makes national news about your group?”

National, Parian thought, stunned. We’re national news.

She couldn’t help but think of her family, of her friends and neighbors. Her sole remaining family member, her friend from the Fashion program. The people who’d come to her territory for protection that she’d ultimately failed to provide.

She felt a sick feeling in her gut at the thought. They’d been surgically altered, and, according to the most recent emails, they were getting surgery to slowly regain their old faces. Were they watching the news right now, thinking of her?

“I’m on the same page as Tattletale,” Grue said. “That’s our business, not yours.”

“I see. Well, I can hope.”

Accord extended a hand.

Parian felt her pulse quicken. A trap? A sneak attack?

Grue took the hand and shook it. Parian could feel the blood pumping in her ears as she watched Accord and the Ambassadors for any sign of betrayal.

Nothing. Accord lowered his hand, then extended it again, in Tattletale’s direction.

She stood, then staggered.

Trap, Parian thought.

Except it was only Tattletale’s mental fatigue. The villainess, with her mercenary’s help, made her way to the foot of the stairs. She leaned on the man as she crossed the room to Accord.

“Injury?” he asked. “I’m thinking a concussion.”

“Migraines. I overused my power.”

“Ah,” Accord said. He extended his hand a fraction further, and Tattletale shook it. “I… suppose I can sympathize with that.”

“I bet.”

“I appreciate your willingness to meet, in light of your condition,” he said. “That said, it would be best if we did not interact further. I’d rather not terminate our alliance by being forced to murder you. It wouldn’t be polite to say how many times I came close, just tonight.”

“I think we’re on the same page there,” Tattletale said. “I don’t want you to kill me either. Just know that if you tried, succeed or fail, I have a lot of questions about your involvement with Cauldron that could start circulating specific channels.”

“Ah, you’re proposing mutually assured destruction?”

“Is there any other way we’re going to manage this long-term?”

“No. No, I suppose not,” Accord said.

“Great,” Tattletale said. She managed a feeble smile.

“Then I wish you a good day,” Accord said. He managed to make it sound like fuck you, the way people in the Victorian era might have.

That done, Accord turned to leave, marching out of the doors with his cadre of Ambassadors.

When he was out of sight, Tattletale sagged. Her mercenary had to catch her to keep her from falling to the ground.

“Okay,” Grue said. “What was that?”

“Me doing the best I could,” Tattletale said. “And speak quieter, please. My head’s throbbing… I feel like someone’s hitting my eyeballs with hammers.”

In a marginally quieter voice, Grue said, “You provoked him.”

“I dealt with him the only way I could. Working with old info. Don’t even have my power, only what I got on our earlier meetings. Shit, I haven’t even read that booklet Skitter gave me.”

“Well,” Regent said. “This is fantastic. Skitter really screwed the pooch here.”

Bitch tensed at the idiom.

“We don’t know what she did,” Grue said. “Or what she’s doing.”

There was a pause.

Parian had felt lost, in well over her head, since she’d set foot in here. These guys were a group, an organization, they had their way of doing things, their rhythm. It was so hard to jump in, to say anything.

But now, maybe, she felt like she had a role. A reason to be here.

“I… I think I understand what she’s doing,” Parian said.

All eyes fell on her. Even Bitch’s gaze, intimidating and angry.

“Generally,” Parian said. “Um. I get what she’s…”

“Spit it out,” Imp said.

“She’s a lot like me,” Parian said. “She wants to protect people. She’s willing to make sacrifices for the people she cares about.”

“I’ve discussed that with her,” Grue said.

“Terribly unhealthy,” Regent commented. “Worse than smoking, even.”

“So maybe this is a way to do that,” Parian said. “A way to protect all of us. She gives Director Tagg exactly what he wants. Gets him to back down. And this is how. She uses herself as a bargaining chip.”

“I don’t fucking care about Tagg,” Bitch growled. “I’d rather have Skitter than have him gone.”

“It’s more than that!” Parian raised her voice, hurrying to speak before she could get lost in the jumble, unable to cut in and find a voice in their dynamic. She had objectivity they didn’t. The ability to see the big picture. “I… I think she’s decided on a way to help all of us. With more things than just Tagg. And maybe… maybe she helps herself, too.”

“Herself?” Regent asked.

“I’m just… I know what it’s like, to be on a single track, to feel compelled to keep going forward. It isn’t easy, to disappoint the people you care about, but sometimes it comes down to doing that… or doing what they want and being unhappy.”

“Unhappy,” Grue said.

“Was there ever a time when she was with us, where she really seemed happy? Content?”

“I know my brother’s made her happy,” Imp said. “Ick.”

Regent sniggered.

“I didn’t,” Grue said, his voice quiet. “Make her happy.”

“I don’t know anything more than you guys do,” Parian said, “But…Maybe she needs to make peace with her guilt and whatever, go to jail, and try to make amends with her dad? If that’s part of it, can we really say no?”

“What if it isn’t part of it?” Tattletale asked. “What if leaving us is the last thing she wants, but she’s doing it anyways?”

“Are you saying that’s the case?” Grue asked.

“No. My power’s out of commission. I can’t say anything for sure,” Tattletale said. “Except we respect Taylor-”

“We’ve been through hell with Taylor,” Grue cut in.

“And we trust her,” Tattletale said, glancing at Bitch.

So she picked up on that too, Parian thought.

“…So let’s trust that she has an idea what she’s doing,” Tattletale finished.

Bitch moved, stepping forward, her boots making a heavy noise on the floor as she advanced. She struck out, kicking.

The widescreen television with its tripod mount came crashing down, shattering.

Nobody spoke in the aftermath of that small gesture of pain and frustration.

They looked amongst one another, searching each other for some validation, for a response.

It was Bitch who broke the spell. “If the PRT fucks her…”

“We destroy them,” Grue finished. Bitch nodded.

The most sensible member in the group in agreement with the most violent, Parian thought.

“All we can do is wait,” Tattletale said.

“How long?”

The question had come from Bitch. She was tense, rigid, her jaw set, eyes narrowed.

“Nightfall,” Tattletale said. “We wait until the sun sets. That’s the only instruction Skitter gave me.”

“What are we waiting for?” Grue asked. “A signal?”

“If we don’t get a signal,” Tattletale said, “We act.”

■

Parian’s thoughts were buzzing with possibilities, more details, more responsibilities. Taking on more territory, giving up some to Grue.

Still struggling to find a way to be relevant.

She reached her atelier and dismounted from the six-legged horse, stepping down to the floor of the alley. It had been a little more stable than a four-legged unicorn. She’d have to refine the idea, find a balance. Specific forms for specific tasks.

She was behind. Behind in her territory, behind in applying her powers to combat situations, in being able to understand and interact with people like Accord.

And until she figured those things out, she couldn’t truly be a part of the Undersiders. And if she wasn’t a real member of the group, she couldn’t change anything where it really mattered.

The unicorn came apart into scraps of cloth. The individual scraps rolled up, were neatly tied by braids of thread. She lifted the largest bundle and made her way around the corner to her front door.

Ten and a half hours before sunset. That was the deadline. Skitter’s deadline, and the point that would determine whether this became an all-out war against the PRT or something entirely different.

Parian stopped in her tracks. Lily leaned beside the front door, in full costume as Flechette. The stainless steel shoulder-rest of her arbalest sat on the ground, and she used a single fingertip to keep the weapon upright, unloaded and pointed at the sky.

With a flick of a finger, Lily made the thing spin, stopped it, spun it the other way around.

“You know where I live,” Parian said.

“The PRT knows where you live,” Lily said. “It’s on record. But we’re not supposed to act like we know. I thought you’d forgive me that, given our history.”

“Is there news? About Skitter?”

Lily shook her head. “They asked me to go out and make a phone call, outside of Skitter’s range. But they didn’t seem to know how far that was, so I…”

“Made your way to the far end of the city,” Parian said.

“Yeah,” Lily said, just under her breath, looking down at her weapon. Again, she spun it.

“You didn’t even know I’d be here.”

“You weren’t. I just got an angry call from Miss Militia,” Lily said. “Been out here for a bit.”

“For…”

“Thirty minutes.”

“Ah.”

Parian put the bundle of cloth down, resting the end on the ground. After a moment’s thought, she leaned it against the wall by her front door. By Lily.

She felt so conspicuous. She knew Lily hated the black costume, with the black hair, the black dress.

Lily, who’d been maybe the only person to give her support without being asked. Lily, who was… chivalrous. Gallant. Stubborn. So very stubborn.

“Did you come here for a reason?” Parian asked, in the same second Lily asked, “Where were you?”

“You first,” Lily said, after the momentary confusion.

“Why did you come here?”

“Don’t know,” Lily said.

“That’s a hell of a reason to wait thirty minutes.”

Lily glanced left, then right, as if looking for bystanders.

“This area isn’t occupied,” Parian said. “My atelier is the only one on the block that you can live in. The rest are sealed up.”

“Atelier?”

“Workshop. Studio. Only fancier.”

“Ah,” Lily said. Then, as if she remembered why she’d been looking for bystanders, she let herself slide down until she was sitting with her back to the wall.

“That’s it for answers?” Parian asked. “Don’t know?”

“No.”

“Just talk me through what’s going through your head. Doesn’t have to be relevant. Don’t have to censor your thoughts.”

“Definitely have to censor my thoughts,” Lily said. She glanced up at Parian.

She felt her heart rate pick up with that, oddly enough, just like it had with Bitch.

Except Lily wasn’t dangerous, was she?

“God, I hate this city,” Lily said.

“It’s… a hard city to like,” Parian said. “But it’s not a city that lets you throw it away. It’s tenacious, both in the big picture, and in how it attaches itself to you.”

“Yeah,” Lily murmured. “Before I came here, everything was on track. I could see my future ahead of me, straight as an arrow. Career path, eventual Flechette action figures. Every single one of my teachers and superiors seemed to know I had potential. One of the only people who could hurt an Endbringer…”

Lily raised her unloaded arbalest, aimed it, “Pow. Critical damage every time, and I don’t miss.”

“I remember what you said when you talked to Skitter and Miss Militia. You don’t feel so confident, now.”

“I’ve been trying to think of where I might be comfortable. Where I could find what I’ve lost. During the whole post-Leviathan thing, I was always most comfortable here.”

“Here?” Parian looked over at her Atelier, an unassuming, simple building.

“With you.”

“Ah.”

“And… fuck me, because I’m not acting confident. I told myself I’d act confident, but… I’m blowing this.”

“Don’t stress so much about acting,” Parian said.

She reached up and detached her mask from the metal frame that held it over her face, then pulled the wig off as well. She let them fall to the ground.

A pure white mask, in contrast to her own Arab ethnicity. She’d meant to make a point of it, to challenge people to wonder more about what was behind the masks, about their assumptions about heroes and villains. That had fallen apart when Leviathan and the Slaughterhouse Nine had derailed her plan to unmask herself and start a career as a fashion designer.

More than the fashion designer part, it was the sudden recollection of what the Slaughterhouse Nine had done that took the wind from her sails.

She tipped over the roll of cloth and then seated herself on it, facing Lily.

Belatedly, she said, “We act too much. Hide behind masks way too often.”

Lily looked around to double-check, then removed her visor.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Lily said.

“Do what?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it is, I can’t do it.”

“I know the feeling,” Parian replied.

“Where were you?”

“You don’t get to ask that,” Parian said, quiet. “Just like you don’t get to act like you own me, to say that my costume is anything but my choice.”

“You remember that,” Lily said, looking down at the ground.

“Hard to forget.”

“Skitter asked me what I wanted,” Lily said. “I gave her my answer.”

“You wanted me.”

Lily nodded.

“I’ve already had someone try to claim me, you know,” Parian said. “They thought that I was something that was owed to them, because of what they’d done. That being nice meant I was obligated to accept a date. And that line of thinking goes one step further. They think flowers and a few dates mean I’m obligated to come over to his apartment to spend the night.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Flechette said.

Parian didn’t answer.

“I mean, it’s not… my motives aren’t…”

“Carnal?”

“Sketchy,” Flechette supplied.

“That doesn’t make it any better.”

“No,” Lily agreed. “Fuck. I was hoping this would go better.”

“And… I’m not so sure your motives were pure. I’ve seen you sneak glances. For someone who has a superpower that gives her enhanced timing, I’d think you’d be better at it.”

Lily turned red, very deliberately not looking at Sabah.

“Once bitten, twice shy,” Sabah said, almost to herself. “I’ve been bitten once.”

“Is that a no?”

“To? You haven’t asked me anything.”

Lily shifted her grip on her arbalest, then set it on the ground, spun it on the end again, as though it were an oversized top.

“Skitter asked me for what I want. What do you want?”

“Direction. No, not even that. It’s almost like I don’t care as much about what I do, as me feeling like I want to do something well, but I can’t.”

The Japanese-American girl frowned. “And this is what you want to do?”

“Yes,” Sabah answered.

“Why?”

“Because it’s the only way to get the rest of the money that my people need.”

“Your people?” Lily started to glance around, then stopped. “Not these people. Your family, friends. From Dolltown.”

Sabah nodded. Her heart was heavy with the thought alone. “And because I need to be a part of the Undersiders if they’re going to listen to me, and I need them to listen to me if I’m going to influence them, keep them on a straighter path. To protect people from them, and to protect them from themselves.“

“And that’s all worth giving up the life you want to lead?”

Parian thought of Skitter. Of the motivations that could be driving the girl to turn on her friends.

“I think it is.”

“Then… would you take me along for the ride?”

Sabah glanced at Lily. Lily was staring at her, an intense look. Scary in its own way, but not quite in that way that was a reminder of uglier days.

“No,” Sabah answered. “I don’t think I can. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but…”

But I don’t trust you. I can’t have someone try to possess me, to control me.

She couldn’t find a graceful way to say it, and she could see the pain on Lily’s face, the doubt, the embarrassment, as the pause lingered.

Then Lily seemed to compose herself. “Not as a partner.”

“No?’

“I meant, um. A lieutenant.”

“A lieutenant?”

“I’m not good at being alone,” Lily said. “I found that out a while ago, and what’s happened these past few weeks, they only made it clearer. I need company, and your company is what I want the most. I can’t say it’ll be forever, but for now…”

Being together… having a helping hand where it counted. Having firepower and authority both, to help win over the locals. It wasn’t perfect, it wouldn’t be fast…

But maybe it wouldn’t be such an uphill climb.

“You’d leave the Wards?”

“They’re falling apart anyways. I’d… I’d have to give up my arbalest. Without tinker maintenance, it won’t keep working. But I always liked the idea of the rapier, been meaning to go back to it. And I have darts.”

“You’re rambling.”

“I’m terrified,” Lily said, meeting Sabah’s eyes. She looked it.

She’s taken a leap of faith, and she hasn’t touched ground.

“You’re saying I call the shots. You’re my lieutenant, my right hand?”

“Yes,” Flechette said.

“My knight in shining armor.”

“I’d need a new costume, and a new name, probably. For legal reasons. If you said yes. I was thinking more a stylized musketeer look than a knight, but I can work with whatever.”

Still rambling.

“A new costume is something I can do,” Sabah answered. “And yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” Sabah said. “You’ll be my lieutenant. And you’re okay with that?”

“That’s… what I’m offering. The last thing I want is to make you uncomfortable.”

“That’s good enough,” Sabah said. She stood, approaching Lily.

Needle and thread. Somehow it felt more right, more solid, than any of the paths she’d started on, only to later abandon. Maybe because she wasn’t doing it alone.

She put two fingers to Lily’s chin, raising it, and then she kissed her lieutenant.

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Interlude 21 (Donation Bonus #1)

Posted on April 27, 2013 by wildbow

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The Number Man swept one finger over the touchscreen display. Two point six billion dollars here, a hundred thousand dollars there.

Money was the blood of civilized society, its currents running through everything and everyone. Where money was insufficient, things withered. People starved, sickened and died, constructions eroded, even ideas perished. Where funds were plentiful, the same things blossomed with new life.

And money was, in the end, little more than the product of collective imagination. A slip of paper or a coin had no value beyond that of the material it was fashioned of. It only took on a life of its own when people as a whole collectively agreed that certain papers and coins were worth something.

Only then did people bleed and die for it. For a fantasy, a faith given form in hard, concrete numbers.

Then again, much of society was built on a series of shared delusions. Clothing was little more than scraps of particular materials with particular geometries, but people clung to the idea of fashion. Style. Good and bad fashion was another belief system, one which all members of a culture were indoctrinated into. Breaking certain conventions didn’t only challenge the aesthetic sensibilities of others, but it challenged their sense of self. It reminded them, subconsciously, of the very pretendings they clung to.

Only those with power could stand against society’s tides, flaunt the collective’s ‘safe’ aesthetic. When one had enough power, others couldn’t rise against them and safely say something calculated to reduce their own dissonance and remind the offending party of the unspoken rules.

When one had enough power to take a life with a twitch of a finger, a thought, they earned the right to wear skin-tight clothing and call themselves Hero, or Legend. To wear a mask and name themselves something inane like ‘the Cockatoo’ and still take themselves seriously.

He armored himself in normalcy. He wore only a button-up shirt and thin-rimmed glasses, his blond hair cut into a short style that was easy to maintain. To anyone on the street, he wouldn’t appear to be anything but a bookish middle-aged man.

He hadn’t always been this bland.

The Number Man stepped away from the screen. His office was plain, white tile with white walls. The rear of it was a floor-to-ceiling window, looking out on a foreign landscape, a place far from Earth. Still an Earth, but not the one he’d been born to, not even the one he was in at this very moment. The Doormaker maintained a portal to that foreign landscape, just behind the Number Man’s office and changed it on request. Today, it was a mountaintop view of a wilderness with a crimson foliage and gray branches, the sky perpetually overcast.

One of a number of Earths where humans had never been.

The Number Man had gone to some lengths to spruce up this place. He’d never liked the eternal white of this complex, so he’d adorned his walls with other images. To his right, there was a large print of the Golden Mean, the Phi decimal as a fractal image in gold against black paper, with mathematical notation surrounding it.

Opposite it, Dali’s Crucifixion, Corpus Hypercubus. The painting was blown up to one-and-a-half times the size. Jesus crucified on a fourth dimensional cross.

No chairs. He’d worked out the dangers of sitting against the convenience and decided it wasn’t worth falling into that trap. When he did enter his office, he walked, paced, tapped his foot while pondering deeper problems, stood and stared out the window at whatever landscape he had outside his window in a given week.

He crossed his room and touched a screen. It lit up, filled with data fed to his computers from a doorway to Earth Bet. The pulse of society, right under his thumb.

The Elite, a villain group expanding a subtle control over the western seaboard of America, putting pressure on rogues to bring them under their thumb as performers, thinkers, designers and innovators. He could see the numbers, extrapolate from the data to gauge their rate of growth. They were developing too slowly to be useful, not developing fast enough to outpace the predicted end of the world. They’d reach Brockton Bay in about a year. There would be time to decide if countermeasures were needed in the meantime.

Gesellschaft, a nationalistic organization half a planet away from the Elite, was moving large funds in anticipation of a small war. Money was being laundered through cover operations and businesses, almost impossible to track, unless one was able to take in the bigger picture, to see the intent, the beginnings and endings of it. They were investing in transportation, and their fundings seemed to decline at the same time some notable arms dealers in Southern Europe found themselves richer by an equal amount. The Number Man flicked his way past a series of windows detailing the transaction amounts. Arms dealers who specialized in nuclear materials. This was pointing towards terrorism, and not on a small scale. Troubling, but the system would address them. The major hero group in Germany, the Meisters, would attend to the problem. It didn’t warrant an expenditure of Cauldron’s full resources, not when things were already on shaky ground.

Still, it wouldn’t do to have a disaster at this crucial juncture. The Protectorate was required for just a little longer. If they were going to make it through this, there couldn’t be any substantial distractions.

Gesellschaft hadn’t elected to seek out the Number Man and make use of his services, as so many supervillains around the world did. He had no compunctions, as a consequence, about interfering with them. He tapped into a series of bank accounts he hadn’t touched in some time, then scheduled a large number of transfers to the personal Gesellschaft accounts. Ten or twenty thousand Euros at a time.

Where funds weren’t likely to be held for moderation, he scheduled more transfers and disputed the charges. The transfer amounts were large enough to raise flags, to draw attention to the accounts in question. The banks were on the lookout for suspicious activity, and a total of five hundred thousand Euros appearing in six checking accounts with typical balances of under a thousand Euros would be suspicious enough to merit a serious look.

That was only to slow them down. They would want to investigate, to be careful and find out where the money came from. Later, if the situation was resolved and they somehow managed to hold on to the money, they would want to know where the money disappeared to, as he reclaimed it with a severe interest rate. They would suspect interference, would wonder if this outside agent had connected their civilian identities to their personas within Gesellschaft.

Which he had.

The transfers took him less than thirty seconds to arrange, and it would occupy them for one or two days.

Freezing the larger business accounts would take only a little more time. One or two minutes. The meetings with the arms dealers had fit a vague schedule. The arms dealers always took a different route, but they traveled enough that they needed to buy gas at one point on the way. There was always a large transfer of funds.

He laid a trap, calculated to start falling into place when the gas was bought in the time window. The main accounts that the Gesellschaft used to manage their funds would be frozen by the time the meeting was underway. They’d likely find themselves at the meeting, the product delivered, but with no funds to pay for it.

He swept his fingertips along the window, dismissing the task. Who else? Where were the priorities?

The C.U.I. had bought a parahuman. Not so unusual. Higher rates, as of late, but then, the C.U.I. faced a slight chance of an Endbringer attack in coming weeks. They would want to bolster their forces, add parahumans to their peculiar team.

Tattletale had been actively separating herself from the Number Man, issuing new accounts to the Undersiders and her organization. Not so surprising. Eidolon had outed him, announcing the Number Man as a Cauldron-involved cape to a crowd.

Irritating. At least it had been manageable. He didn’t exactly have a great deal of traction with the hero community. Tattletale was one loss, and he was hands-off with the Undersiders, regardless.

The King’s Men were in debt. Easy enough to manage an anonymous donation, keep them afloat for another two months.

Child’s play, all of it. The money, with its imaginary value, it was something he breathed. Setting up the tools to manipulate it had taken a little time, but that was it. Numbers were the fundament of the universe, as much a fabrication as money in some ways, more real than anything else in others.

He understood numbers, and through them, he understood everything.

A soft beep marked the arrival of somebody at his door. He turned. “Enter.”

There was only one person it could logically be. The Doctor only sent her personal bodyguard and right-hand woman to him, the others didn’t have access to this building.

Except it wasn’t a person. The door swung open, but there was nobody on the other side.

“You can’t handle it yourself?” he asked.

No reply, of course.

He broke into a quick stride, hurrying through the door. “Contessa is busy, I take it?”

Again, no reply.

He reached an intersection and felt his hair stir imperceptibly, little more than what one might excuse as the exhaust from an air conditioning vent thirty feet away. He took that as his cue to change direction.

He knew where he was going, now. He was relieved that it wasn’t the worst case scenario, if one could call it that. A mercenary calling herself Faultline had been leading a team that was opening portals for exorbitant amounts, traveling the world. It was a matter of time before someone contacted her to ask her to open a portal to here, or her own curiosity about Cauldron happened to lead her down that same road.

If and when that happened, the young woman and her team… perhaps organization was more fitting now that their numbers had grown, would get a visit from Contessa. They would be removed from consideration, the portal would be sealed, and Cauldron would be safe again.

In the meantime, they’d let things carry on like they were. Faultline would make contacts, she’d find like-minded individuals, and through her, Cauldron would uncover enemies, to be eliminated in one fell swoop.

At the very least, right here and right now, the threat wasn’t an invader. Given the layout of the complex, and the fact that whole wings of the structure were on separate continents, linked only by the Doormaker, there were only a few possibilities for why an invader would be here. Not that it really mattered, it would be near impossible for someone to find their way here, now.

No, this was a threat from within.

Double doors unlocked and slid open. The Number Man wrinkled his nose as he entered the basement areas of the building.

When the Simurgh had attacked Madison, she’d copied Haywire’s technology to open a gate to a building much like this one. A research facility. The portal had dumped the buildings, soil, plant life and all the residents into the city on Earth Bet, costing Cauldron a horrific amount. Even a stockpile of formulae had been lost.

Perhaps most frustrating was the knowledge, the near certainty, that they’d been near a breakthrough. She’d sensed, somehow, had known, and had dashed it to pieces with the ease that a person might tear down a painstakingly made sandcastle.

They’d rebuilt, and this facility was somewhat different. More reinforced, connected to the surrounding terrain.

Silly, to think she’d do the same thing twice, but they’d felt it necessary, after feeling the losses of that last attack.

The architecture here wasn’t white, and he was somewhat relieved at that. The tile was dark gray, lit by fluorescent bulbs and the light from windows at the end of the hallway. At regular intervals down the hallway, there were cells. Only some had windows to keep the occupants within. Others had only three walls and a white line that marked the division between the cell and the hallway.

In each cell was an occupant. Large metal plates engraved with numbers helped track who they were, matched to the numbers hidden in the right ‘arm’ of the tattoo that each subject received; a series of white dots that looked like nothing more than areas where the tattoo hadn’t taken.

The cells on the right were new test subjects, lost and angry. He didn’t hesitate as he walked past them. The angry words they spat in alien languages were nothing to him. Their glares and hatred less than that.

Their powers were only a small consideration. It was a rare parahuman that didn’t try to move beyond the boundary of their cell. There was no forcefield to stop them. They inevitably ignored the warnings and gestures from those in neighboring cells, stepping free, or they used their power, teleporting free or lashing out at one of the staff. The Doctor, the Number Man, Contessa.

They learned after the first time.

Several staff members were housed in the cells to the Number Man’s left. Those cells didn’t open directly into the hallway. There were short paths that led around to the back of the room. It helped mask the noise, gave them some privacy. The cells were bigger too.

Zero-twenty-three, with a placard beneath. ‘Doormaker’.

Two-six-five. No name. The Number Man knew him well enough, regardless. He’d been too young a subject when he’d taken the formula, his brain too malleable for the required changes, too slow to form natural immunities and defenses. Not a problem with regular trigger events, as it was. The boy’s eyes had burned out of his sockets as he’d tried to process the vast amount of information he was capable of perceiving. Even now as he was reaching his late teens, the boy’s mind had never developed beyond the mental age of eight, and his eyes remained like twin ashtrays.

A partner to the Doormaker, capable of granting clairvoyance, seeing whole other worlds at once. It left most subjects incapacitated for a week after use, and it overrode any other perception powers.

No use to the Number Man, but essential for Cauldron in vetting universes and finding individuals. Most individuals. There were some, like the Dealer, and triple-seven, who’d escaped.

Two-nine-three. Incapable of talking, barely able to move. Limbless, obese. Another key member of the staff.

No sign of interference. The odds of the threat being an assassin dropped.

He quickened his pace, reaching the stairwell at the end of the corridor.

Second floor basement. He stepped out of the stairwell and progressed down the main hallway. There were rows of cells to either side of him. Two thousand and forty-eight parahumans, each with a number, both on the wall of their cell and in their tattoo.

“You need to narrow it down,” the Number Man said. “Help me find the trouble.”

His voice resulted in an outcry, the people in the cells nearest him realizing he was there, shouting, swearing, insulting him in twenty-nine different languages.

He ignored the shouting, instead extending his right hand. “Is it this floor? Yes…”

He extended his left hand, “Or no?”

The faintest brush of air touched his left hand, so faint he might not have felt it while he was walking.

He turned back for the staircase, made his way down.

The third floor basement. Here, the special case studies could be found. Seven-seven-seven had been one. They got a name, more space, some quiet.

He paused. Again, a brush against his left hand.

“Damn,” he said, meaning it.

It was on the fourth floor.

He took the stairs two at a time, moving with an uncharacteristic haste. He also spoke, more to himself than his companion. “There are others who are supposed to attend to these matters. Which suggests the escapee is smart, is strong enough to deal with them, or… as is more typical for the denizens of the fourth floor, interesting.”

Smart, he could deal with. Strong, he could deal with, barring certain exceptions. Interesting escapees, well. There’d be degrees of unpleasantness.

He was still hurrying down the stairs as he reached the bottom. Two doors, both heavy, stainless steel top to bottom, capable of withstanding a small bomb blast. Only the Doctor entered the rightmost door. The Number Man turned his attention to the door on the left, and entered his access codes, pressed his hand against the disguised plate to the right.

As security measures went, it wasn’t impossible to crack, not when one considered the breadth of parahuman abilities, but if anyone who got this far decided to pass through this door, they deserved what they got.

The deviations, the ones who didn’t take to the formula, tended to fall into certain categories. There were those who had some minor physical or mental changes; they were little different from the most extreme deviations that appeared in typical trigger cases. Such deviations occurred a mere eighth of a percent of the time. They weren’t what he was thinking of.

The formula wasn’t exact. Though they learned more every day, there were still unknowns regarding powers. Whatever connection the agents formed with individuals before or during a trigger event, it didn’t manifest as strongly through the formula. When the subject was stressed, their body engaged by that distress, the connection grew weaker.

In typical cases, the agent seemed to momentarily reach out to search the entire world, many worlds for reference material, to seize on the subject’s conception of a ‘bird’ or conception of ‘movement’, to build up an understanding of things that didn’t exist in the agent’s realm of experience.

And in cases of a deviation scenario, the agent noted the physical stress and searched the subject’s frame of reference for something, anything that might reinforce what it saw as a damaged host.

For many -for ninety-three percent of the unfortunates who were so afflicted- the agent drew from plant and animal life, from physical objects, materials and designs in the subject’s immediate vicinity.

But seven percent of the extreme deviant cases didn’t find something physical, and there was little to nothing to rein things in.

Such cases were not, as a general rule, released into the wild. It would be counterproductive. They were briefly studied, then disposed of. The Number Man’s office was in this building because he was but one line of defense against escapees and threats, even in this department.

He paused, concentrating.

As though it were penciled in the air, in thread-thin, elaborate notation, he could see the geometry and the numbers unfolding across the world around him, through the air.

He withdrew a pen from his pocket, spun it around one finger. The notation billowed around it, and through it, he could see the movement of the pen, the plotted trajectory, the velocity and rotation of it. The numbers clicked into place with a speed that made the rest of him, his very perceptions, seem like slow motion.

Here and there, there were incongruities. Painting an entirely different picture. His companion was here, near him. Bending the most fundamental rules. The Custodian.

In another scenario, she would have been kept here and disposed of once we’d found a way to dissect her.

“I know you want to help,” he commented. He wasn’t even entirely sure if he was being heard. “You see it as your responsibility. But it’s best you stay behind.”

That said, he pushed the door open.

If the cells on the third basement floor were twice as large as the ones on the second floor, these were larger still. Each was isolated, standalone in the vast, dark basement. The space allowed countermeasures to be maintained in each space.

And here, experiment number three-zero-one-six was out of his cell. The Number Man knew of this one. He’d paid particular attention, once he’d heard about the peculiarities, heard about the power.

The man was only half-dressed, his upper body bare, his beard a shaggy growth, his hair long and greasy. Showers were provided, where patients were able to make use of them, but the solitude wore on them, and few partook with any regularity.

But the part of the man was unusual was what wasn’t there.

One leg of his uniform flapped in the wake of a wind turbine used to keep two-nine-nine-zero contained. There was no right leg beneath the pelvis, but his right foot was there nonetheless, set firmly on the ground. He stood as if his weight rested on it.

Other parts of him had been carved away when he’d had his trigger event. An area of his stomach, around one eye, his entire left arm. Where they had been severed, there was only a gray plane, featureless, without shading or definition.

But the Number Man could see it. Could see it in the physics of the way the pants leg moved, just slightly out of tune with the way it should have been flapping. There was something there, a disturbance.

The test subject had destroyed one wind turbine, was facing the occupant, who was hidden in shadow.

“We escape,” three-zero-one-six said, his voice a rasp, heavily accented. “Together. I stop the spirit, you take-”

He stopped, turned to face the Number Man. The pair was separated by an expanse of a hundred feet, in an open area with a high ceiling, only the lighting around each standalone cell allowed them to see one another.

No conversation, no pleading. Three-zero-one-six struck before he could be attacked, leaning back and then swinging, using the left arm that wasn’t there.

The Number Man was already moving, the mathematical notation filling his field of vision, singing in his ears, running along his skin. He could taste it, virtually swam in a clear, precise, organized outline of the world around him.

His weight shifted as he found his center of balance. He kicked out to push himself to the left.

Three-zero-one-six manifested the strike as though his arm were exponentially larger, the attack repeated in almost infinite variations through the space in front of him, as though he were leveraging every possible version of himself that could have been here, in this basement, drawing them together in one coordinated strike.

Concrete and steel were obliterated, and the blow carved divots into floor and ceiling both, disintegrated layers of stainless steel that sat behind and beneath the concrete of floor and wall.

The Number Man was airborne. He’d measured the trajectory of the first hit as it carved through the ceiling, letting it slide past him by a mere one and three-quarter feet. He angled and oriented his body to absorb the rush of wind and dust, used it to carry himself just a little further, a little higher. His shoes squeaked as they found traction.

He chanced one glance backwards. The attack had left a hole in the wall, the shape matching the impression that one might have made with an outstretched hand, fingers grasping, except it was fifty-two point seven six times the man’s handspan.

More notation, more numbers to work with. He could extrapolate, get an estimation of his opponent’s weapon. He’d need a point of reference…

He hesitated, as though he were catching his balance, glanced briefly at the nearest cell, while keeping the test subject in his peripheral vision.

Another attack, baited so it would fall in a particular direction, not striking anything vital to Cauldron’s operations. If this test subject got the idea of repeatedly striking in a downward direction, or striking up, then it opened up a whole mess of problems. There were test subjects on upper floors, and below… well… it was best to leave everything below to the Doctor.

He evaded the attack as he had the first, but allowed it to fall closer. Even without looking back, he knew he had the numbers right. The attack with the left arm was the same size each time. The strike passed within an inch of the Number Man.

Probability, time, he thought. He was expending less energy on evading the attacks, now. He focused instead on the possible attacks, the range of motion. The notation that sprung forth put him in mind of the Vitruvian Man, expanded to encompass every possible strike that might occur.

Not seeing the future, but rather the possible consequences that might unfold.

Now the Number Man was free to evade even before the attacks occurred. As a tennis player might move to cover the open court as the opponent’s racket was drawn back in anticipation of a strike, he was bolting for the safe zone, the area where incoming attacks weren’t as likely to fall, where his opponent would have to take time to adjust his orientation to effectively strike.

Which would be a fatal mistake on his opponent’s part.

No. Test subject three-zero-one-six didn’t use his left arm. He kicked out with the one leg that had only the foot attached.

The Number Man ducked under the strike, throwing himself forward, rolling, found his feet in the same motion. The kick demolished whole tracts of flooring, tearing into the bottom of the stairwell.

The distance between himself and his foe was now a mere fifty-seven feet and eight inches.

Two more strikes, sweeping attacks with a fist that could gouge floor and ceiling both at the same time, and each time, the Number Man slipped by unscathed, closing the distance at the same time.

He could see the fear on the man’s face.

Deimos, the Number Man thought. It was an old thought, a familiar thought in the same way someone might find their mother’s cooking familiar, and it wasn’t his voice he heard it in.

Another strike, this one coming dangerously close to two-nine-nine-zero’s cell, followed by another strike in the reverse direction.

Phobos, the Number Man thought. First terror, then mindless panic.

The attacks were more frantic now, but that was to be expected. The Number Man had conserved his strength, had the stamina to move more quickly.

Twice, his opponent tried to feint, to change directions mid-strike. He caught on quickly enough to take advantage, closing the distance to thirty feet and seven inches away, then twenty feet, two inches.

Subject three-zero-one-six had two options. One was to be clever, to claw at the ground between them and create a divide, a moat.

The other was to strike.

The Number Man forced the decision. He calculated his movements, let one foot skid on the dusty ground, sprawled, rolling with his own momentum.

He could hear the rasp as it tore through a section of ceiling, the attack incoming, saw the probable strike zones unfolding before his eyes. Rolled until he had his feet under him, then sprung.

The attack missed by as narrow a margin as he’d permitted for the others.

He straightened, studied the confusion and fear on his opponent’s face. Every action on his part was measured, performed for effect. To dust his clothes off, walking forward at a measured, unhurried pace.

To not even flinch as his opponent drew his hand back. He was still able to dodge. Barely.

“Stop,” he said. “There’s no point.”

The test subject backed away a step instead. He tensed, readying to kick out with that nonexistent leg of his.

“You’ll miss,” the Number Man said. “And I’ll close in and strike you, using my pen and my hand. I can see the stress points of your body, clear as day. I can shatter your skull like a glass, and it would be an exceptionally painful way to die.”

Slowly, he saw the fight go out of the test subject.

“Why?”

“Return to your cell, and we can talk.”

“I can’t. I’m going mad,” the test subject sounded almost morose, defeated.

“There’s only one alternative, three-zero-one-six.”

“My name is Reyner!”

“You lost that name when you came here.”

“Why!?”

“Reyner died. Maybe it was war, maybe it was plague. But we sent our people to collect you before you passed. Some of the collectors were like me, others more like you, made to think the way we needed them to think.”

The test subject’s eyes widened. “You’re mad.”

“Reyner died. This… it’s a purgatory.”

“I do not know the word.”

Not in his lexicon?

“Purgatory? A limbo. A place between,” the Number man said. He advanced, and the test subject retreated.

“Between what?”

“Hell and paradise. The mortal coil and the world beyond. This is a neutral ground.”

“Neutral? Can you even understand what you’re doing to us? I… I’m a child’s toy, pieces missing.”

The Number Man studied three-zero-one-six. He couldn’t imagine any toy like that. Another cultural distinction, hailing to the man’s universe?

“I understand a great deal about what we’re doing to you. I could explain the experiments, the effects on your body, as we understand them, inform you-”

“Morally.”

“Ah,” the Number Man replied. “Morals.”

Another delusion perpetuated by society. Useful, valuable, much like commerce, but still a delusion. It only served its purpose so long as it was more constructive than not adhering to those beliefs, but people often lost sight of the fact, made it out to be something it wasn’t.

He’d suddenly lost a great deal of interest in this conversation.

“I have a family. A wife and children.”

“I told you. You died when you came here. You left them some time ago.”

“I… no.”

“Yes. But what you’re doing here, helping us, it’s going to make a difference. It will help save your wife and kids. When you die, we will autopsy you. We will use what we learn to find stronger powers. Those powers will expand our influence and help us against the true threats.”

“Threats? To my family?”

“Yes. To everyone.”

“You’ll save them?”

“We’ll try.”

Three-zero-one-six slumped, “I can’t go back to my cell.”

“I could kill you, if you wished.”

“If I’m going to die, I’ll die fighting.’

“You’ll only make it violent, painful. It will be drawn out.”

He could see the man’s expression shifting, the dawning realization that there was no way out.

“Did… was there a chance I could have won?”

“Yes. Luck. A little more cleverness. If you were in better shape, perhaps.” My power is better at range. Better still as I get further away, attack from other angles, in more subtle ways.

“Then I could have escaped? A chance I might have returned home?”

“No. There was never a chance you might escape.”

■

The door slid open. He made his way to the chair, a laptop tucked under one arm.

The Doctor was present. She looked weary, but her hair was immaculate, pinned into a bun. She stared out the window at this world’s landscape, so different from his own view.

“That’s two escape attempts in two weeks. We had three in the last four years before that, only one successful,” he said.

“I’m aware.”

“We’ll need to change our approach.”

She turned around. “How?”

“We need Contessa closer to home.”

“She’s required for damage control. Too many capes who were present for the Echidna incident think they can destroy us by spreading the word about Cauldron.”

“Perhaps we stop performing damage control. Let the pieces finish falling where they will.”

“We’d fall further behind in our agenda.”

“Undoubtedly. But as it stands, it’s only a matter of time before we’re destroyed from within. Our operation is too big and too delicate to manage like this.”

The Doctor frowned. “It would mean less voluntary subjects.”

“Very likely.”

The Doctor frowned. “And we’re behind schedule, even if we ignore that. I’d hoped to use Shatterbird or Siberian.”

“Unlikely anything would have come of it.”

“But if it had?”

The Number Man had no reply to that. He set his laptop on the desk and booted it up. If they had been able to leverage either of them to defeat an Endbringer, or to find why they had wound up so powerful, compared to the typical parahuman…

“It seems we may have just lost Brockton Bay.”

The Number Man’s eyebrows rose, though his expression remained placid, his gaze fixed on the computer.

“Skitter turned herself in.”

With that, he did look up, meeting her gaze. He saw the truth in her statement and closed his eyes. Mourning one more lost possibility.

They’d lost Coil, had lost Hero, and the Triumvirate had dissolved. They were in the process of losing the Protectorate. Everything they’d put together, falling apart over time.

“Is it settled?” He asked.

“No,” the Doctor said. “But she turned herself in, and as far as I’m aware, there is no mischief at work.”

“Then it’s not necessarily over.”

“We can’t interfere.”

“I’m aware.”

“We have to take more risks,” the Doctor said. “If we’re going to recover from these last few setbacks.”

“What risks?”

“If we’re to decipher the formula, find the strongest effects, we can’t keep tempering the mixture with the ‘balance’ concoction.”

“Creating more deviations.”

“Far more,” the Doctor said. “But we found the strongest powers before we were diluting the doses.”

“We’d lose up to twenty-three percent of our potential client base.”

“We lower the price. It’s almost trivial at this point. The only reason we set a price in the first place was to wean out anyone who wasn’t fully committed. We’ve supplemented virtually every other part of our operations with parahuman powers.”

“That only returns us to the issue of how we control our interests. We can’t have deviations running around, or we’ll bring disaster down on our own heads.”

“I was thinking we use you in the field, Number Man.”

The Number Man leaned back in his chair. “Me.”

“You’d perform. You have performed in the past.”

“I suppose,” he mused. He rubbed his chin. He needed to shave. “A long time ago.”

“I know you wanted to get away from that business, but-”

He shook his head. “No. This is bigger than things I want. If I can participate in this, I can get my hands dirty. We’ll be looking for the Slaughterhouse Nine, I take it?”

“No. The heroes are already looking, I’m not sure what we could contribute. There are other matters to consider, and we’re giving up a great deal of control behind the scenes by having you in the field, rather than working elsewhere.”

“I take it this is another risk we’re taking?”

“Yes. Increasing the volatility of the formulas, deploying you while we reserve Contessa for the more severe situations, allowing the public to discover more of Cauldron’s role in things…”

“Hopefully not too much,” he said.

The Doctor shook her head. “Not too much. When will you be prepared to relieve her?”

“A day or two. Let me get prepared.” He stood. “I left the data on the laptop. Funding, the movements of key groups.”

“Thank you.”

He left the room. His power alerted him about the Custodian’s presence as he entered the hallway. The sum of a million infinitesimal details.

It also informed him of the seam in the hallway, marking the nearly invisible Doormaker portal. He stepped from the Doctor’s headquarters to the hallway leading to his own office.

Doormaker had changed the landscape beyond his window. An Earth of black magma and brilliant sunsets in the middle of the day, apparently.

He moved his Dali picture, sliding it to one side, and stepped into the doorway beyond.

Barring incidents like earlier in the day, it had been a long time since he had exercised his power in any serious way.

The costume, neatly folded on a shelf at the end of the closet, seemed so very small as he unfolded it.

Even the smell, it brought back memories.

■

1987

The pair of them were breathing heavily.

They exchanged glances. Two faces, spattered with flecks of blood.

Jacob carefully stepped around the expanding pool of blood. He crouched by the body, then grinned.

The other face wasn’t smiling at all. It was grim, a stark opposite, just as their hair colors were nearly opposites.

We’re nearly opposites in more than hair color.

“He can die after all,” Jacob mused.

“Yes.”

“Wasn’t all that,” Jacob mused. He looked almost disappointed.

“Maybe not.”

“Bastard!” Jacob kicked the body. “Prick!”

I’m worried he’ll get up all of a sudden, even with his guts hanging out and half his blood on the ground.

Jacob stretched, and wet blood ran down his arm as he raised it over his head. He still held the murder weapon. One of the murder weapons. It had been a shared effort.

“This doesn’t end it. They’ll come after us.”

“We could lie,” Jacob said. “Tell them he used mind control.”

“They won’t believe us.”

“Then we run with it. Everyone will have an idea who we are, after this, we can make a name for ourselves.”

“We have names.”

“A reputation. Don’t tell me you don’t feel like there is something bigger, something better. You call yourself Harbinger. That’s all about the things to come.”

“His name for me, not mine,” Harbinger said.

“But the idea… There’s something bigger than this, something at the end of the road,” Jacob said.

“I don’t see the point.”

“But you feel it, don’t you? The rush?”

“Yes,” Harbinger said.

“Forget the stupid names and spandex. Tell me your heart isn’t pounding, that you’ve never felt more alive than this.”

Harbinger shook his head.

“We can live this. Together. Every waking second…”

“Jacob.”

“Jack,” Jacob said. He kicked King’s body again. “Fuck it. He always called me Jacob, practically purring. His little killer in training. As if I could match up to his Gray Boy. I want to be more than that. Get out from under his shadow.”

“Okay… Jack.”

“If it’s a farce, a joke, let’s run with it. We take simple names, dumb names, and we make people quake in their shoes at the sound. Jack… Slash.”

“I’m… no. I won’t.”

Jack wheeled on him, knife in hand.

“You want to fight?” Jack asked. The smile had dropped from his face.

The look in his eyes… hungry.

“No. That’s just it. I don’t want to keep doing this.”

“You said it yourself. You feel the rush, like you’re on the cusp of something greater.”

“I do feel it, but I think I can get there by walking a different road,” Harbinger said.

He could see the disappointment on Jack’s face. See the way Jack’s knuckles whitened as he tightened his grip on the blade. His power blossomed around the boy, showing possible attack vectors. Too many. Harbinger wasn’t sure he’d survive.

He might have to throw himself in the way of the attack and kill his friend before a more serious attack could be delivered.

Or…

“I’ll play, though,” he said.

“Play?”

“Make a name for myself.”

Jack smiled.

■

Present

The Number Man set the costume down. He picked up the knife. The same one he’d used to stab King in the back, buying Jack time to open the man’s stomach.

He wouldn’t wear a costume. Wouldn’t do anything particularly fancy. He’d even keep this name. A measure of respect to an old friend. Something to challenge convention.

Jack was his other number, his inverse. The Number Man was working to save lives, and he killed as a matter of kindness. Jack considered killing a matter of fact, and any life he spared was only for his own twisted ends.

The Number Man still considered the man a friend, as much as he knew that friendship was one of those ephemeral constructs. One of the delusions people subjected themselves to, to make the world make sense.

Or maybe Jack was family. They’d started out on the same path, after all.

Did Jack know that there was another parallel? That the numbers and the research with Cauldron were illustrating something else entirely?

The Number Man had been gifted with powers of perception. To see the underpinnings of the world. In a roundabout way, he used his power for killing, for destruction. Jack had been gifted with a power that was good only for killing, but the Number Man harbored a suspicion that Jack was more than that.

Research within Cauldron had included tinkers, drawing many conclusions about how tinkers operated. Some were well vested in mechanical details, drawing a great deal from it to fabricate their work. Others had little idea about the technical aspects of what they created, relying more on instinct and creativity, relying more on their agents to draw up an idea of how their work would function. It was quite possible that other capes were doing the same thing.

There was no way Jack should have made it this far on luck and instinct alone. Not dealing with the monsters he interacted with on a daily basis. The idea had started as a theory, but had taken on a life of its own: was it possible that Jack was drawing on the same agent that granted him his powers? Wittingly or unwittingly?

Did he have a second set of eyes watching out for him? Sharpening his instincts? Giving him a sense of imminent danger or his vulnerable targets?

And more to the point: why?

Was Jack, perhaps, in particular sync with his agent in mindset?

And if he was, did that suggest something about their motives?

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Imago 21.7

Posted on April 25, 2013 by wildbow

306

Last Chapter Next Chapter

I eased the door closed, then paused to let my eyes adjust.

Every window had the blinds closed and curtains shut over it. The room was dusty, and needle-thin rays of light caught the flurries of specks, making them glow.

I grew aware of my surroundings, distinguishing dark gray shapes from an oppressive darkness. A desk sat in the middle of the room, shaped like a ‘c’, with a cushy computer chair in the middle. Four monitors were arranged at even intervals across the desk. Beyond them, three widescreen televisions were mounted on tripods. The walls and open spaces beyond the televisions, in turn, were filled with bulletin boards and whiteboards.

I glanced at my phone. The last text I’d received was still displayed on the main screen:

the nearest keyboard to entrance. don’ wander and don’t turn monitor on. type WQtksDH2.

I followed the instructions, making my way to the desk, carefully angling my body so I wouldn’t touch any of the bulletin boards, and so that I didn’t bump anything with the loose fabric of my running pants or my backpack. I didn’t want to risk using my bugs to check for obstacles, so I was forced to rely on my eyes alone, in this near-total darkness.

I found the keyboard, found the little nibs on the ‘f’ and ‘j’ keys so I could center my hand, and very carefully typed out the password.

A series of barely-audible ‘beeps’ sounded throughout the room. What had I just disabled? Claymores?

Did I really want to know?

Free of whatever safeguards that had been set in place, I turned on the monitor. The faint glow lit up one half of the room, casting light on Tattletale’s costume in one corner, and the heavy metal door leading to her bedroom.

I found a dimmer switch on the wall and turned the lights up just enough that I could see. The details on the bulletin boards became clear. They were color coded by subject, but there were threads connecting elements, pieces of yarn tacked into place or held in spots with magnets.

I approached the nearest boards. The set furthest to the left were each headed ‘Cauldron’, with subheadings, and had either green construction paper or words in green marker. The board closest to me had photos of various capes, organized into forty rows and twenty-five columns, headed ‘Cauldron, unconfirmed’. One-and-a-half inch by one inch images of various masks, their names penned in underneath. Here and there, portraits were missing, presumably where Tattletale had found better spots for them.

So many capes. It was startling really, and I was suspicious it was incomplete. Was she planning on expanding that?

The upper half had sections marked for ‘likely’ and ‘confirmed’. Many of the ‘likely’ capes had a series of letters and numbers by their name, five digits long: reference numbers.

There were only three ‘confirmed’ capes on the board. Capes that had been more or less verified, through a combination of admission and Tattletale’s powers: Eidolon, Alexandria, Legend.

Lines were drawn on the construction paper behind them, pointing to one portrait-sized rectangle of paper at the top, as though indicating a hierarchy. It was blank, and the ‘name’ at the very bottom was only ‘Cauldron?’.

The back of the same bulletin board had ‘confirmed trigger’ capes and ‘Case 53’. Each ‘trigger’ cape had a trigger event marked in pen below the name, along with the same series of letters and numbers by their name: Jadeite: Post-brainwashing dissonance HSPuT. Gethsemane: Lost family in war H2UXa. Skitter: Bullying 9Zw3t.

The rest of the Undersiders were on that section of the board as well, but the trigger events had been left off. Chances were good that she didn’t want prying eyes to dig up details, while my information was presumably public knowledge.

I walked across her setup, my hand trailing across the index cards and pictures as I walked, as though I could take in the information through touch.

Lengths of yarn connected the ‘Cauldron’ board to the PRT board, which was a whiteboard, magnets affixing index cards to specific areas. A black piece of yarn extended from Alexandria on the ‘Cauldron’ board to the recently retired Chief Director on the ‘PRT’ board. Black for a direct connection? Yellow yarn extended from the Cauldron board to index cards regarding PRT funds.

The whiteboard held scrawlings of notes, musings and possibilities, some half-erased. Degree of involvement with Cauldron? Funding: is PRT siphoning official funds to pay for powers? Agenda?

It wasn’t reassuring. The number of questions, the idea that the PRT might be far larger than I’d conceived.

I moved on to boards of a different color. The red bulletin boards and whiteboards with red writing: Brockton Bay. Potential threats: the Teeth, Red Handed, Heartbreaker, Lost Garden, Adepts, the Orchard, The Fallen.

Each was labeled with a code, much like the trigger events had been, and a letter-number combination after that.

It took me only a minute to find what they were referring to. Things were organized beyond the initial veneer of chaos. A small bookshelf, knee-high, held file folders with the same letter-number pairings as I saw on the bulletin board. I picked one out at random.

Adepts. Self professed magic users. One page of information, listing names and powers. Another page with the PRT’s information on them: a series of codes and symbols I didn’t quite follow, numbers inside colored circles, squares and diamonds. From what I could gather, they had a low threat level, moderate crime rate, moderate ‘engagement’ level, low activity level. Led by Epoch, a time traveler.

Fun. I didn’t even want to think about the headaches that power would cause.

I put the folder away carefully, picked out another. Lost Garden. High threat level, low crime rate, low engagement level and moderate activity level. Leader, Barrow. A powerful shaker, similar to Labyrinth, only rather more single-minded in what he did. He couldn’t leave the altered area he created around him, only extending it slowly to an area while letting it fade behind him, an effect described as ‘a depression’ with overgrowth extending into the surrounding neighborhood. Tattletale’s own notes in the file suggested he was making slow but steady progress towards Brockton Bay, and that he had been since the portal appeared.

I flipped through the rest of the file. What kind of people gravitated towards someone like that? Apparently a lot of very young parahumans, boys and girls around Aisha’s age, had gathered around the middle-aged Barrow. A little creepy, when I imagined that collection of capes and the resulting dynamic.

I put the folder away, returned to the boards. Brockton Bay had several more. Money. Planning. Property acquisition priorities. Property sales. A whiteboard with the word ‘door’ written in red, circled and underlined several times, surrounded by question marks.

Who would own the portal?

A single blue-lettered whiteboard with pale blue index cards. At the very top was the title, in bold black letters: Powers: Source.

I looked at the index cards that were fixed onto the board with magnets. There were no real answers there. Only questions and theorizing. It was Tattletale’s stream of consciousness distilled.

the whole? pieces of greater puzzle but don’t know what shape it takes. place person thing or something less concrete? what are powers? Mirror/extrapolation a consideration? is there link between there and here?

why? power distribution aimless simple chaotic. mistake? something go wrong? is this only part of something greater? scheme or something more base?

why trigger events? why go to trouble? Connection to the source? tied to something primal or some scheme? simple or complicated?

what is deviation between cauldron and typical trigger? was there leak to water supply from cauldron? Parasite? look into epidemiology. prob not. get someone’s story about process for getting powers from Cauldron for hints.

Who has answers? if not thinkers then capes with closer connection to passenger? PRT? Cauldron? S9? other gov’ts? what channels can I use to get these answers? theft, coercion money goodwill barter? have to set a value for an answer before raising idea with ~~coil~~ Skitter

I frowned and stepped away.

The last board, far right, was backed by black construction paper. At the top, printed on white index cards in bold black letters: ‘End of the World’.

The board was disturbingly empty. Jack’s picture was in the upper left corner with pieces of paper arranged below it, tracking everything that he’d done since he left the city. Each piece of paper had names of known entities he’d interacted with in any direct fashion. Sites the Nine had attacked, a string of small towns as they progressed in a zig-zagging fashion away from Brockton Bay.

Capes recruited to the group, capes slain.

The other three-quarters of that board were almost entirely clear, but for one index card in the upper-right:

limits to Dinah ability: can’t see accurately points of interaction with power immune capes, precogs, situ change Thinkers. Limited sight past points of interaction. these are ‘stoppers’

Hartford: No known stoppers in area.
Enfield: No known stoppers in area.
Chicopee: No known stoppers in area.
Southbridge: No known stoppers in area.
Boston, Charlestown Area: Yes stoppers, no direct interaction b/w any stoppers and Nine. ~~call to dble check with Still~~. no interaction
Toybox: No known stoppers.

It made a lot of sense. Tracking Jack’s trail of destruction from the point he’d left the city, finding the point where Dinah couldn’t or shouldn’t be able to see, using them to narrow down possibilities.

But the expanse of black on that board was daunting, considering everything that was at stake.

I made my way to the desk, set my backpack down on the ground, and took a seat in Tattletale’s chair. I pressed the power buttons for each of the other monitors, and they flickered on. Checking the drawers, I found a remote, and turned each television on in turn.

Two televisions dedicated to news, one to business, each on mute, with captions spelling out the words as the reporters spoke.

The password I’d entered had apparently logged me into the computers as a guest. I kicked off my shoes and set my feet on the desk, as I’d seen Tattletale do, slipping into her shoes for a moment.

Everything was arranged so it was in clear view: monitors, televisions, bulletin boards. Looking at the notes, the different colors, the disorder and the number of questions, it made me think of a kind of paranoid schizophrenia, seeing connections everywhere. Except she was right.

Even logged in as a guest, I could see vestiges of the programs she’d installed on her main accounts: a stock ticker, a news ticker, weather, time, trending topics, social media feeds, several alert boxes for when pages relating to certain topics were updated or created. Even the background was a series of four video feeds from cameras that overlooked Brockton Bay.

That was just what was worked into the desktop, with no windows opened.

The monitors flickered with new information at a speed that was two or three times that of the televisions, and the material on the televisions wasn’t exactly slow-paced. The bulletin boards, conversely were static. It was like a physical representation of what was going on in Tattletale’s mind. Information streaming in, details from other sources intruding as I tried to focus on only one. And always, there were the questions in the background, the same ones marked on the bulletin board. Things to keep in mind while she took in other details, constantly seeking out the connections that tied things together. Did she simply sit here, taking it all in, while using her phone and the computer to manage the Undersider’s business?

No small wonder she had overloaded on her power.

I opened up a browser window on the computer, logged into Parahumans Online.

Two new tabs. A search for Skitter, a search for Taylor Hebert.

‘About 95,000 posts relating to Skitter.’

‘About 5,200 posts relating to Taylor Hebert.’

I sighed, closed the tabs, and then investigated the board for Brockton Bay. It wasn’t anything I wanted to read.

I had checked most of the pages up to the halfway point on page two of the Brockton Bay sub-board when the heavy metal door clicked and opened. Tattletale- Lisa stepped out, wearing an oversized t-shirt and pyjama pants. My momentary confusion on how to define her was due to the fact that her hair was down, which I associated with Tattletale, while she was in civilian clothes, which was naturally fit for the name ‘Lisa’.

“Su- oh hell,” she broke off, recoiling in pain in the face of the dim lights and the glow of the various screens and monitors, shielding her eyes.

I hurried to reach for the dimmer switch, but she was already calling out a command, “System, lights off.”

The lights went out.

“System, screens off.”

The televisions and computer monitors went dark.

“Sorry,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Thought you’d have recovered more.”

“Nah,” she said. She still wasn’t opening her eyes, and was speaking with a care that suggested even the sound of her own voice hurt her. I could see dark circles under her eyes. She probably hadn’t slept recently. “But no big.”

“You could go back to bed,” I said.

“No way am I missing this,” she said. “My chair.”

I climbed out of the chair and turned it around so the seat was available to her. She made her way there as if she were an old woman, eased herself into the seat and reclined, putting her feet on the desk. One arm draped over her face so her eyes were hidden in the crook of her elbow.

“This setup… all of this is too much for you,” I said. “You’re trying to handle too much at once.”

“Ironic,” she mumbled, “Coming from you.”

I took a seat on the edge of the desk. “You’re bombarding yourself. You should try to tackle one thing at a time.”

“Can’t. I focus on one thing, I let others fall by the wayside. Too many bases to cover.”

“Maybe you should let things fall by the wayside,” I commented. “Is it so important to understand where powers come from? Isn’t it enough to run the city, watch out for enemies, and maybe devote weekends to figuring out this business with Jack?”

She groaned.

“Sorry,” I said. I was only giving her more cues and prompting involuntary uses of her power, making the problem worse. Asking questions was cruel, with her like this.

“No. No, it’s okay. It’s all related. I described my power as being like a massive, three-dimensional game of Sudoku, right? Spaces get filled in.”

“Yeah.”

“This… if I get stuck somewhere, maybe there’s something on the periphery that helps me figure it out from another angle. If I’m going to tackle the problem, I gotta tackle the whole problem. Helps keep the facts straight. Notice sooner when the wrong piece of information’s in a spot.”

“You forgot to note that Accord buys powers,” I said. “Came up a little while ago, didn’t see them on the back of the green board.”

She put her feet down on the ground, as if she was going to spring up and make the necessary adjustment, then seemed to think twice about it. She rested her elbows on the table and buried her face in her hands.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“Index cards are on the shelf by the door.”

I got up and walked over to the shelf, fished around until I found the green index cards and a black felt-tip pen. I wrote down, ‘Reminder: Accord buys powers from Cauldron to empower qualified underlings. They don’t know much about process, but he will.’

I pinned it up in the ‘Likely’ section.

When I was done, I glanced back at Lisa, still resting her head in her hands.

I let a minute or two pass in silence, while she got her bearings.

“So,” she finally said.

“So.”

“Sorry I took so long to show,” she said.

“Not a problem,” I said. “I enjoyed the peace. A moment of quiet before the storm.”

“I’m not messing up your schedule? What time is it? Eight?”

I started to shake my head, then realized she wasn’t looking at me. Hard to tell in the gloom. “You aren’t. And it’s about seven forty-five.”

“Not sure I follow this plan of yours. That’s a bad sign, if I can’t get my head around it.”

“You’re not exactly in the best shape.”

“Still.”

“Still,” I echoed her, sighing. I leaned against the wall, hooking my thumbs in my pockets. “Maybe you’re right.”

She slowly raised her head, grimaced, and then shifted back to a reclining position, moving at a glacial speed. I felt a pang of sympathy.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked.

“Drugs don’t help.”

“Something besides drugs, maybe. Water.”

“No. Nothing makes a difference except time, being very still, very dark and very quiet. Let’s just…”

She trailed off.

“Let’s just what?” I prompted.

“I was going to say we should get this over with, but… we don’t want that, do we?”

“No,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

Silence lingered.

I stared at the room, all the unanswered questions now illegible in the darkness, reduced to shades of dark gray on black, and black on dark gray.

Those questions were Lisa’s province. My focus was on the team, the dynamics of the group, and the how we handled those beyond our inner circle. Our enemies, allies who could become enemies. Even the public at large had to be handled, managed, addressed as a possible threat.

Those were the concerns I had right now.

“Wish I could use my power more,” Lisa said, “Give you advice so you’re going in with your eyes wide open.”

“I wish you could too. Don’t be upset with yourself, though. I didn’t give you much advance warning, and you’d already overloaded your power. The sentiment’s enough.”

“It’s not, really. Fuck me. I’m not very good at this. Being uncertain. Frustrated. Disappointed in my inability to offer anything…”

She trailed off.

I thought of the Lisa I knew, her personality, her general demeanor. Slightly reckless, confident, cocky. Fearless.

“And scared?” I offered.

“Scared,” she agreed.

I’d never really seen her vulnerable. I’d seen her hurt, had seen her reactions after her arm had been dislocated, after Jack had slashed her face open. I’d seen her worried, even spooked, when the Endbringer was en-route, and when she’d been concerned for me.

But this was Lisa, temporarily bereft of her powers. A mere mortal.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that.

“You know, Rachel said thank you last night,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Got me thinking,” I said. “Don’t know if I ever said it to you. I owe you the most, in a way.”

Lisa smiled, but it wasn’t a joyful expression. She murmured, “Don’t know if you should be that thankful. What I did, bringing you on board, trying to help you, if I can even call it help, considering where we wound up.”

“The means justify the end, maybe,” I suggested.

“Maybe.”

“I appreciate it, whatever the case,” I told her.

“Then you’re welcome,” she said.

She changed position, and I made out a nearly imperceptible noise of pain.

“And I think that’s my cue to go,” I told her.

She frowned, “Damn. That’s it?”

I shrugged. “What more is there to say?”

“I’m supposed to give you advice. Some insight. But I’m crapped out.”

“Give it a shot anyways,” I suggested.

She frowned. After a few seconds, she said, “Give ’em hell.”

“Will do,” I said. I approached her, then leaned down and wrapped my arms around her, while she was still sitting in the chair. One gesture, as if it could convey everything I couldn’t say with words.

Grue had worried I was fatalistic. That wasn’t quite the term that applied, here. But the underlying idea was sound.

We’d established something of a rule, way back when, on the night we’d first found out about Dinah and her powers, the same night Leviathan had arrived. I’d very nearly turned my back on the group, and Tattletale had established a rule.

No goodbyes.

I collected my backpack, turned, and then left, wordless.

The sun and the heat were working on destroying the fog that had settled around the city in the wake of the grim weather. The result was that the sky was very blue overhead, the city still harboring traces of the early morning’s fog. It couldn’t be later than nine.

I wasn’t wearing a costume, but I wasn’t hiding in clothing I wouldn’t normally wear, either. A simple white tank top, black running pants and running shoes. For all the bystanders could see, I was Taylor Hebert, indistinguishable in appearance or fashion from the girl who’d appeared on the news.

Nobody gave me a second glance. I moved with purpose, and that was enough. The eyes in the crowd looked right past me.

It had taken me some time to get used to the sheer obliviousness of people. Even Rachel, with her distinct appearance, had been able to manage with brief public appearances. It was less about getting caught, more about escape routes. Being spotted while I was on my way to visit Grue and Citrine would have been problematic. Being spotted on my way back to my territory wasn’t a problem. By the time the heroes could respond, they wouldn’t be cause for any concern.

The same principle applied here. The only distinction was why the heroes weren’t a cause for concern.

Tension sang through my body with every step. My stomach felt hollow – I hadn’t had much of an appetite this morning.

At the same time, I felt an almost zen calm. My thoughts were clear. I’d already decided on a plan of action. It was a similar calm to the one I’d experienced against Dragon and Defiant.

I approached the PRT headquarters. Many of the bugs I’d infested the building with on my last visit were still there, and the occupants of the building had adjusted to them. Nobody gave a second thought to the bugs that made contact with them, unless it was to absently slap at a mosquito or brush an ant from their leg.

I could sense Tagg in his office, talking on the phone.

People were filing in through the front doors, some were employees, others were tourists, eager to check out the newly opened gift shop and inquire about a tour. It was puzzling. Did Tagg not anticipate another attack? Or had he decided that my attack with my bugs was the very extreme to which I was ready to go? The full extent of the threat I posed when angered?

The PRT officers stationed just inside the door, grown men and women who had the job of looking out for troublemakers, barely glanced at me as I joined the crowd and walked right under their noses.

Then again, I’d said something to Regent about that. Attacking from an unexpected direction, doing the last thing one’s enemy expected. This was definitely that. There was no way they expected me to walk into the building, first thing in the morning on a sunny day, when they hadn’t even done anything in recent memory to provoke me.

I made my way into the center of the lobby and stopped to looked around.

Maybe it was that I was standing still, while the rest of the people in the lobby were moving. If not moving against the flow, resisting it. But someone noticed me. A PRT officer by the front desk. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, reaching for his weapon.

I exhaled slowly. I felt eerily calm, while my power roared at the periphery of my consciousness. It was as if my bugs were screaming at me to attack, to retaliate. To strip flesh from bone, sting and bite.

I pushed my bugs back, told them to go still. It had been months since my power and I were this at odds. Months since I’d been in the bathroom of Winslow High, telling myself I didn’t want to fight, that I didn’t want to retaliate against the bullies.

But now I was left to wonder if that was my subconscious or my passenger?

“Villain!” the PRT officer bellowed as he trained his gun on me.

The reaction was oddly delayed, as each one of the fifty or sixty people in the lobby turned to the PRT officer for a cue, for some indication of the danger or the direction of the threat. They saw the direction that he was facing and the direction his gun was pointing, and turned their attention to me.

Only then did the civilians and unarmed staff scream, run, and seek cover. Only then did the PRT officers around me draw weapons and point them at me. A half-dozen PRT officers in full body armor, with their lethal and nonlethal weapons trained on me.

“Get down!” one officer screamed.

I slowly dropped to my knees, then folded my hands behind my head.

There were sounds of footsteps. I could see Miss Militia and the Wards exiting a room behind the front desk. I tried to think of what my bugs had told me about the layout on past visits. It was a meeting room, if I was remembering right.

Miss Militia, Clockblocker, Flechette, Vista, and Crucible stared, eyes wide. Miss Militia’s expression was one of concern, her eyebrows furrowed. She was still, compared to the PRT officers around me, who were shouting at me, asking questions I couldn’t answer. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, as if I could find the same kind of refuge Tattletale had been seeking, find a stillness by shutting out the chaos of the outside world.

I’d said my goodbyes to my team, as much as I’d been able.

I’d put my ducks in a row, again, as much as I could. I’d have to trust to Grue to see to Regent and Aisha, keep them on the right path. I’d have to trust Tattletale to look after Grue.

I’d decided, in the course of talking to my mom, that I’d have to cross a line if I was going to follow Dinah’s instructions, if I was going to achieve everything I needed and wanted to achieve. To do it, I’d told her, I’d have to be heartless, and this was the most heartless, inhuman thing I could do. Leaving my people. Leaving Rachel. Leaving Brian.

I thought of the paper, of the words from Dinah. ‘Cut ties’. I hope you know what you’re doing, Dinah. because this is as cut as I can get them.

My eyes met Miss Militia’s.

“I surrender.”

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Imago 21.6

Posted on April 23, 2013 by wildbow

458

Last Chapter Next Chapter

Hate to do this with the weather like this, I thought. I thought about the meeting Parian had arranged with Miss Militia. But my hand is being inadvertently forced.

One more step forward. One more phase in the plan.

The wind was worse than the rain. I had to wonder how much of it was the aftermath of the Leviathan attack. The city had been flooded, and those same floodwaters had evaporated into the air, trapped within Brockton Bay by the surrounding trees and hills… how wide-reaching were the effects of that one incident?

The downpour was steady, moderate. The wind was what turned it into a barrage, a persistent pelting of droplets that moved horizontally as much as it moved vertically. The noise of it, tapping against my armor and lenses, made for a steady patter. My bugs were lurking and gathering in spots where there was shelter, and where things were dry. With only the light of the moon above, these were the same areas that had shadows, by and large. The masses of bugs only seemed to give those shadows substance, made them seem deeper, through the masses of dark brown, gray and black bodies.

Through other bugs I felt the movements of the wind, felt how it formed eddies, curling into itself when it met with dead ends, large or small. I could, with a small number of bugs, feel how strong and steady the gale was where the buildings weren’t tall enough to break it up. They helped me track the others around me, through bugs that took shelter in the drier folds of their costumes.

The Undersiders were here. Minus Tattletale, we were all standing in the street a distance away from a squat building. Regent was off to one side, ready to trip up our enemy if they made a sudden appearance. Rachel hung back, corralling her forces, while the rest of us watched the building for any hint of trouble.

But Grue stood next to me. I appreciated his presence, his casualness in light of the way we’d effectively parted.

I could sense the Ambassadors. Citrine and Othello were there. So were four new recruits: Jacklight, Ligeia, Lizardtail and Codex. The fifth potential recruit hadn’t been so lucky. The four of them stood off to one side, in the shelter of Citrine’s power, listening as she gave instructions. The area around them was somehow faded in terms of the colors there, the area she was affecting looked as though I were viewing it through colorblind eyes that were capable of only seeing yellow. Water wicked off of them as though they were waterproof, leaving them utterly dry even in the wind and rain.

Lizardtail’s power was pressing against me, even from the other side of the street. It penetrated my costume to the skin, making my skin tingle and ensuring that I was always aware of where he was. It was like the sensation of standing in front of a fire, just close enough to feel as though that heat had a physical form, just close enough to be bearable. It wasn’t hot, though. It was cold, if anything.

The rest of our forces were marshaled throughout the area. A handful of volunteers from my territory, surviving members of the O’Daly family, had made their way to rooftops, stood at the ready with walkie-talkies and binoculars. They’d have to make up for the fact that my bugs weren’t as mobile in this weather.

Tattletale’s mercenaries were here, though she was still largely incapacitated. Minor, Brooks, Pritt, Senegal, and Jaw. Regent had two followers, and I was doing my best to avoid paying attention to them. It wasn’t the time to investigate whether he was controlling people or legitimately hiring them.

Rachel’s underlings were present too, hanging back enough that they were out of sight of the building. Biter, Barker, the veterinarian, the boy with the eyepatch, others I didn’t recognize: a young teenager with darker skin, a tall man with a broad belly. Each of them held a chain -the tall man and Biter held two- and each chain had a dog harnessed on the other end of it, grown to a fair size by Rachel’s power. Only Bentley and Bastard were full size.

Inside the building, the Teeth were recuperating from a recent conflict with Miss Militia and the other heroes followed soon after by an attack from Parian’s stuffed animals. As a whole, the Teeth amounted to twenty or so unpowered troops, plus a half-dozen or so powered ones. Even the unpowered Teeth had ‘costumes’ of a sort, were dressed in a hodgepodge of armor that made it hard to tell them apart from the powered members.

As a whole, they were bandaging minor injuries, preparing food, talking, joking, relaxing. There were two televisions on, each playing something different, volume turned up, and the noise was discordant, even to the muted, confused senses of my swarm. Porn on one television, I was pretty sure. The other channel was either a cartoon or a news broadcast, judging by the words I was able to hear.

There was a fight in progress, a duel, between two unpowered members. One was getting the better of the other, pounding his face in while others jeered and laughed.

One of the female members of the Teeth, I suspected Hemorrhagia, was cooking food for her team. A distance away, Butcher was sitting on a stool, her feet up on a table, her mask off. She had a cloth in hand and was wiping her gun clean, oddly disconnected from the clatter and chaos of her team.

I supposed the thirteen other voices in her head kept her company.

It had taken time to analyze them, to assess what each of the Teeth were doing and make a note of every individual part of it. To do it discreetly, with no more than the bugs that were already in the building.

The Ambassadors were patient. I got the sense that they could have waited for two hours in this wind and rain, and their only concern would be that their clothes and hair were a little worse for wear. My teammates were a touch more restless. Rachel moved from dog to dog, enforcing her authority, keeping them in line, and making sure they were listening to the underlings. She was putting her trust in me, but I could tell she was getting tired of this. Tired of the minutes passing with nothing happening.

Regent, too, was reacting. He was maintaining a running commentary on everything from the weather to the surroundings, our allies and me.

“And… twenty minutes in, the rain’s still pouring, the wind’s still threatening to drop a house on our heads, and we’re still not doing anything. I think our fearless leader needs to remember that some of us aren’t as good at being imposing when we’re drenched and standing around in the dark. She does that whole schtick where being gloomy and creepy only make her scarier. You know how scary I am with a wet shirt clinging to me?”

“Shut up, Regent,” Grue said.

“I’m just saying. She could be more considerate. Maybe we could wait indoors, and she could stand out here in the rain, using her power to investigate our enemies. If she’s even using it. Maybe she fell asleep standing up. Been a hard week for her-.”

“Regent,” I said. “Be quiet.”

“She’s awake! Excellent,” Regent’s jovial tone was forced enough to border on the sarcastic.

“There are no vantage points that are also indoors,” I said. “I’d bet that’s why Butcher chose that building. The parking lot that surrounds it, the terrain, it’s all to her benefit.”

“So we pick a mediocre vantage point. Or a shitty one. So long as it’s dry. Or, here’s an idea, maybe we attack. We have them outnumbered, we have better powers than most of them-”

“We win absolutely,” I said. “Or we don’t fight at all. Too many of them have powers that could help them escape. Vex fills an area with her power and runs, Animos transforms and runs, or Spree masks their retreat with his power. This way, we take all of them down, or we at least affect them on a psychological level.”

“Then why don’t we have them surrounded?”

“Because we don’t need to,” I said. “Keeping Butcher from picking us off is a bigger priority. We do that by forming battle lines.”

“Huh,” he said. There was a pause. “Twenty three minutes, standing in the rain…”

Inside the building, Hemorrhagia called out, “…st ready.”

The Teeth collectively began to make their way to the kitchen, while Spree headed for the washroom.

There.

“We’re attacking,” I said, and I spoke through the bugs that were near each of my allies. “Be ready.”

The bugs I’d kept in reserve swept into the building, not from the direction our forces were standing, but from the opposite direction. They flowed in, swarming over the Teeth.

Less useful bugs plunged themselves into the food. They scattered money, where money was left out in the open, caught unattended weapons and pieces of armor and either buried them or started to drag them from sight.

“No!” Hemorrhagia shouted, trying to cover her chili with a lid, “No, no, fuck you, no!”

Hearing the shouting, Spree stood from the toilet, only to find a handcuff connecting him to the towel rack.

“Fight!” one of the Teeth shouted, rather unnecessarily. He was joined by others. “Kick their asses! Kill them!”

Spree managed to tear the towel rack from the wall and made his way out of the washroom, working to get his belt buckled, other armor gathered under one arm. I was well aware of how costumes made using washrooms a pain in the ass on the best of days: getting everything necessary off, getting it back on again, attaching everything essential… Spree had the added issue of innumerable trophies and pieces of armor in his suit, all loaded down with spikes and hooks, and he was now in a rush, running forward into a swarm of biting, stinging insects. He dropped one piece of armor, and bugs swarmed it. He cast one backwards glance at the item in question, an elbow pad or knee pad, and then decided to leave it behind.

It was the little things that would deliver a hit to their morale. Attacking while they were tired, spoiling a meal they were anticipating, throwing everything into disarray. If they happened to come out ahead in this fight, or if any of them slipped away, they might return to reclaim their things, they’d find cockroaches had chewed through the cords and internal wires of their televisions, that pantry moths infested their food supplies, and every article of clothing was infested with lice.

And if they entered this fight mad, all the better. It would mean they were gunning for us instead of running.

The first person out the door was caught by a tripline of spider silk. Others trampled over him. One fired a gun into the darkness beyond.

Wrong door, wrong end of the building. And the door had somehow closed and locked behind them.

The powered members weren’t in that group, though. As disorganized as the rank and file members were, the capes in the gang were only looking to their boss, gathering in the kitchen.

Butcher didn’t react as bugs bit and stung, and capsaicin-laden bugs found her eyes and nose. Her skin was too tough, and she didn’t feel pain, thanks to Butcher twelve’s powers. She was composed as she lifted a gun that would normally have been mounted on the back of a truck. Without putting it down, she held it with one hand and donned her mask.

She turned our way, as though it wasn’t even a question. A sensory power.

Butcher two, the ability to see people’s veins, arteries and hearts through walls.

She had the powers of thirteen capes, watered down, plus her own. Some of those capes had possessed multiple abilities. By power or by cunning, each had managed to kill the last. This Butcher had the resources of each of them.

She led her group through the doors towards us, as silent as they were noisy. I’d almost expected her to do the inverse of what she was doing and send her foot-troops in first. Instead, she was the first through the doors, her powered allies immediately behind her. Her foot troops were last to arrive, traveling around the full length of the building, swearing all the way. They filled in the gaps of her group and gathered behind.

It was a different dynamic than some groups we’d fought. These weren’t loyal soldiers or people fighting because they had nothing to lose. They were opportunists, riding the coattails of the ones with the real power, hyenas picking at the scraps that were left behind after the lions had supped.

Spree was the first to use his power, and I got a sense of just how and why the group had arrived at this present strategy. It wasn’t just that Butcher was dangerous enough to walk face-first into danger. They had Spree to form their front ranks.

Four Sprees split off from him as he stood there, slightly hunched over as if bracing himself against recoil. They were produced with such force and speed that they briefly flew through the air, stumbling slightly as they hit the ground running. Three more Sprees were a fraction of a second after the first wave, with even more following a half-second behind them.

Fifteen or so Sprees in three seconds, before I’d even had a chance to call out an order. Duplicates produced at the rate that a machine gun spat bullets.

They ran, some screaming, others swearing aloud as they closed the distance between our two groups, charging as a mass, limbs flailing, weapons-

Weapons?

It was hard to see in the rain, but the Sprees were all subtly different. Some had knives or pipes they could bludgeon with, others had guns, and more had improvised weapons. The mixing and matching of their armor was different as well.

There was a drawback, though. Whatever they were, as solid and innumerable as they might have been, they were dumb, getting dumber every second they were alive. He was producing a living tide of bodies, but they weren’t capable. They were good for little more than sheer body mass and violence.

By the time the first ones reached us, they were barely able to put one foot in front of the other. One reached me, swung a table leg at me in a wide, predictable swing. I caught it, twisted his arm, and pushed him into a Spree that was stumbling forward from behind him. They both fell, and neither seemed to have the wherewithal to climb to their feet before they were trampled underfoot.

It was like fighting an infant with the size and strength of a grown man, except there were fifty or sixty of them. A hundred? The street was nearly filled with the bastards, from sidewalk to sidewalk, a mob between the Teeth and us.

They didn’t seem to be smart enough to realize they could actually shoot the guns, where the occasional Spree had one in hand, but the sound of a gunshot going off suggested that one had accidentally pulled a trigger. The shot rang through the air, cutting through the thrum of raindrops striking ground.

Like the gunshot that marked the start of a race, it was the moment that brought the real fighting to a peak. The Teeth and our side all jumped into action.

My bugs flooded into the group, condensing on the key members. I couldn’t seem to touch the Spree that was generating the mindless clones, as his body vibrated and rippled, but I could attack Hemorrhagia, Animos, Butcher, Reaver, Vex and the underlings. The press of near-identical bodies was almost useful, giving my bugs shelter and dry surfaces to move on.

Codex advanced, breaking away from the rest of the Ambassadors. She was a pale woman dressed in a white evening gown, wearing a simple, featureless white mask. A temporary costume.

She reached towards the crowd. I could see the eyes of the Sprees lighting up as the effect reached further back into the crowd. They stumbled, slowing, blocking the ones behind them from advancing. Groans and grunts echoed from the crowd, all eerily similar.

Their powers were new. Less than six hours old. Accord had agreed to lend them to us, though their costumes hadn’t yet been designed, their powers not fully explored. We’d offered Tattletale’s analysis of their capabilities in exchange. She’d barely been capable, hadn’t yet recuperated from the migraines she’d suffered earlier in the week, and the use of her power had only brought the migraines back with a vengeance.

Still, we’d talked it over and agreed that the assistance of the Ambassadors as a whole was that much more useful in this scenario than a worn and weary Tattletale. Tattletale’s feedback was essential, but we already had a sense of who the Teeth were, and Tattletale had been able to fill us in on the new Ambassadors just as readily as she’d filled Accord in.

Codex was a blaster-thinker hybrid. Tattletale had speculated that the woman caused permanent brain damage and memory loss , briefly augmenting her own processing power in exchange. The duplicates Spree was generating weren’t gifted with much in the way of brains to begin with. Even a little damage was having devastating results.

Jacklight was launching forth the miniscule orbs of light, each growing as it traveled before stopping in mid-air. Each warped space around it, accelerated movement, enhanced the output of certain forms of energy. Where one of his lights was set next to a wall, it redirected one running duplicate into a wall. Another, closer to the ground, swung a Spree that stepped over it into the ground face first.

It was Ligeia, though, who slowed down the enemy the most. She created water out of nothing, geysers of the stuff that drove the mob back and sent them sprawling.

Then she sucked up the water. I wasn’t entirely sure, but I got the impression she caught one or two duplicates in the process, drawing them into whatever place she’d taken the water from.

It took her a second each time she switched from creating water to drawing it in. Clones slipped through the gaps in the defensive line as she changed gears.

“Rachel!” I gave the order. Before Jacklight’s power makes it impossible to go further or more slip through.

Her responding whistle cut through the night. Bentley and three more dogs were released, charging forward, leaping over our defensive line to crash into a sea of duplicates. The duplicates were now too closely packed together to even fall down, and were literally climbing over top of one another. The dogs stumbled or slipped as the Jacklights tugged at one or two of their legs, then proceeded to tear their way through the crowd.

They were brought to a stop when they found the second of the Teeth’s defensive powers waiting for them. Vex’s forcefields were countless, numbering in the hundreds, each sharp enough to cut exposed flesh. Alone, they weren’t strong, but the shards had a collective, cumulative resistance. I’d hoped Rachel’s dogs would have enough raw strength to power through.

Still, we had the advantage here. The tide of the duplicates was slowed as the bludgeoning power of the dogs crumpled them underfoot or crushed them against one another, and both Barker and Biter were free to join the defensive line. I was able to step back and get a brief respite from the hand to hand fighting with the Spree duplicates.

“Kip up!” Rachel bellowed the words.

One dog leaped to the side, planting its feet on a wall, then leaped for the Teeth on the far side.

A four-legged creature just a little smaller than the dog lunged into the air, brought the two of them crashing down into the midst of the sea of tiny forcefields. Animos.

Cape teams naturally found their own synergies and strategies. This was how the Teeth fought. Two defensive lines protecting the reserve forces while the truly dangerous members acted.

Butcher raised her gun, setting one finger on a trigger of her gun. It started spinning up.

“Butcher incoming!” I called out.

She teleported past the worst of Vex’s forcefield barrier. Flame billowed around her in a muted explosion as she appeared.

Butcher six’s explosive teleporting. It’s weaker than it was when six had it, shorter range, and the intensity of the explosion isn’t nearly what it once was.

She pushed past the remainder, and leveled the gatling gun at the nearest dog, pulled the trigger before anyone, Regent included, could do anything to trip her up.

Ten bullets were fired in a half-second. A moment later, the weapon jammed.

Wounded but intact, the dog turned and snapped at her.

She was gone a heartbeat before the teeth snapped together.

Butcher three’s danger sense. Didn’t do him much good. Driven mad, died in a suicidal attack against the Teeth. Window of opportunity is lower, application limited to more physical danger.

She reappeared in a cloud of rolling flame, reversed her grip on her gatling gun and swung it like a club, knocking Bentley clean off his feet.

Super strength, courtesy of one, three, six, nine, eleven and thirteen. Cumulative effects. A little bit of super strength from multiple sources added up.

Animos was pinned by another dog, a yellow light surrounding both of the unnatural beasts. He screeched at the dog, a high-pitched noise that made me wince, but the effect didn’t take hold. Animos’ scream could strip someone temporarily of their powers, but Citrine was dampening the effect. That, or there was nothing to take away from the dog. The mutation was Rachel’s power, technically.

Butcher approached the pair, and Citrine abandoned her assault, letting up.

As Tattletale had warned Grue, she’d warned Citrine as well. Butcher’s power was too dangerous to muck with. Grue risked absorbing the consciousness of the prior Butchers, and Citrine risked striking on the right ‘attunement’ and accidentally killing Butcher.

But Citrine was still a leader, didn’t waste a moment. She gave the signal, shouted something I couldn’t make out, and her followers opened fire. Jacklight and Codex lobbed their attacks towards Butcher, and the leader of the Teeth teleported away before either could do any real damage. Ligeia produced a geyser of water that sent duplicates flying ten or twelve feet in the air. Othello, for his part, was standing by, his hands in his pockets, his two-tone mask expressionless.

Which wasn’t to say he wasn’t contributing. Hemorrhagia was enduring an assault from an invisible, immaterial foe. I could feel him, feel the movement against my bugs, but the bugs didn’t settle on him, simply passed through. He was only partially there, focusing on allowing certain aspects of himself, his weapon, to affect our world.

Shallow cuts appeared on Hemmorhagia’s face, chest and arms as she tried ineffectually to shield herself, and those same cuts exploded violently as she used her power to draw her blood from her body and turn it into hard, physical, cutting weapons. More blood congealed into broad scabs that protected her and reduced the damage of the continuous slashes.

A distance away, Imp appeared, electrocuting Spree with a jab of her taser and bringing an end to the stream of duplicates. Not that the duplicates were doing as much damage as they had been. Like lemmings running off a cliff, many were scaling the piles of fallen clones and promptly running into Vex’s forcefields, only adding more corpses to the virtual hill of corpses that separated us from the other members of the Teeth.

Our two Strangers were doing much of the work in dealing with the back line. That left us to deal with Butcher.

Bentley had recovered and charged her. She responded by hitting him with a wave of pain, putting him off his guard so she could strike him aside.

Butcher one. Inflicted agony at range.

Bentley was quick to recover, quick to push past the pain that she was inflicting and attack. She prepared to strike him again.

Regent knocked her off-balance, and she was caught off guard as Bentley struck her with one paw.

She teleported out of Bentley’s way before he could follow through with the attack, appeared in between Regent and I, surrounded by our capes. We staggered back as flame washed over us.

I felt my focus begin to slip, thoughts of violence filling my mind. I itched to attack, to hurt her.

I sent my bugs in, but that was the one gesture that set the others in motion. Without realizing it, I found myself charging her.

Biter and Regent were among those caught in her spell. We attacked her as mindlessly as Spree duplicates had attacked us.

My knife stabbed at her armor, doing too little damage. I stabbed again, found a vulnerable spot at the back of her neck, just below her hairline. I dragged the knife through her flesh.

Without even turning to face me, she elbowed me, and all the strength I had went out of me. I careened a distance away, tumbled, landed amidst Spree clones.

They clutched feebly at me while I reeled.

Lizardtail’s power pressed even harder against me. I could feel the edges of my injuries tingling, the wounds slowly knitting closed. Far slower than they should have been, given the earlier demonstration of Lizardtail’s power. Either he was weaker, or her ability to inflict wounds that progressively got worse over time was taking away from the power of his regeneration.

Butcher had a grip on Regent, threw him into Biter with enough strength to take the two of them out of the fight.

Possibly enough strength to kill one, if Lizardtail’s power wasn’t able to outpace the internal damage done.

Induces mindless rage. Power from Butcher Nine. Very low range.

Inflicts wounds that fester. Power from Butcher Four. Less effect than Four had. Far shorter duration.

She teleported. I could sense where she’d arrived as my bugs died en-masse. She was going after Rachel.

I had lines of silk prepared, did what I could to bind Butcher. She struggled briefly, then teleported free of them.

Codex and Ligeia directed attacks her way, and again, Butcher disappeared before either could really affect her.

I felt something shift inside me, and the pain dropped to a fraction of what it had been. I got to my feet.

“Go!” I shouted. “Get the wounded!”

Rachel whistled, and the dogs converged on our location. Butcher had appeared in the midst of the Ambassadors, but the variety and ferocity of their attacks had her teleporting from moment to moment, doing more damage with the flames that appeared around her than through any action she could carry out.

It seemed that even though Codex’s attack hadn’t connected full force, Butcher wasn’t keen on giving her an opportunity to deliver any more grazing hits.

Rachel stopped next to me, offered me a hand up.

“Fetch Codex,” I said. “The Ambassador in white. Butcher’s going after her. It might mean Codex is doing the most damage.”

Rachel gave me a curt nod, and we charged, leaving Grue to help Regent.

Butcher teleported away as Bentley hurtled at her. I reached for Codex, took her hand. She looked at Citrine, as if asking permission.

“Go,” Citrine said.

I helped Codex up onto Bentley’s back. She had to sit sidesaddle. Those ridiculous dresses. They weren’t meant for fighting.

But, then, I suspected that Accord was used to ‘shock and awe’ tactics, when he had to engage in a direct assault. How many of his enemies were as tough, versatile or persistent as Butcher?

She’d teleported away, effectively leaving her team to fend for themselves. Only Reaver, Vex and, to a lesser degree, Hemorrhagia, were in fighting shape. Butcher was interested only in the fight. She was the central pillar of the Teeth, and stopping her would stop them, and for much that reason, her team was a secondary concern to us as well.

“Run!” I told Rachel. “Codex, hit her where you can.”

I was versed in fighting teleporting foes, had engaged in a similar conflict against Oni Lee. Butcher wasn’t him. She didn’t obsessively use knives.

No, she was drawing a configuration of metal rods and panels from her back. Her gun abandoned in the course of the fighting, she was unfolding the device into a different weapon.

A compound bow.

I already knew which power she was using next. Imp had sabotaged the gun, jamming the ammo feed, but she hadn’t been able to get at the bow. It was massive when fully unfolded, nearly six feet long, not counting the extra length as part of the curve. Large enough that it required superhuman strength to draw.

Less than a year ago, Butcher had been known as Quarrel, and as Tattletale told it, Quarrel had used a much smaller version of that same bow to kill Butcher Thirteen in a drawn-out fight in New York.

Regent wasn’t in fighting shape. My bugs weren’t able to move fast enough to reach her. Ligeia wasn’t in a position to hit her with water, and Jacklight’s orbs didn’t reach nearly that far.

If she started shooting, we’d drop like flies.

“Hit her,” I said. “Codex!”

Codex reached out to use her brain-drain attack. It was visible only by the effects it had, but I’d seen it move through the Spree clones. It was slow.

Butcher had time to string her bow before she had to teleport out of the way, appearing on top of a building with a vantage point of the battlefield. She knelt, touching the rooftop, and reformed the stone into arrows.

That power was Butcher Eight’s, except he’d had more reach, was faster.

Bugs clustered at her eyes, but she barely seemed to notice. Nearly blind, she drew her string, pointed the arrow at us.

Before I could react, shout a warning, Codex hit me with enough force to nearly unseat me, despite how I was sitting astride Bentley. Something else struck my shoulder with enough force to tear half the armor away.

The new villain slumped and fell, joined by the piece of my armor that had been shorn off. An arrow neatly penetrated her neck.

Butcher drew her bow again.

She didn’t miss. She did something to warp space or adjust the very fabric of reality, so her shots always struck the intended target.

She aimed towards my teammates, paused, lowered her weapon a second as if momentarily confused.

The bow swept in the Ambassador’s direction.

Then she turned, her body rotating, the massive bow and long arrow pointing at us. Rachel and I.

“Go!” I shouted. “Go, go!”

We could only get out of range.

How far could a bow like that send an arrow flying?

Apparently Butcher didn’t think it would be this far. She teleported, paused, then teleported again. A small fire erupted at each destination point.

Another teleport, and she killed a swarm of bugs I’d left lying in wait. I’d hoped she would fall short, and that I could bind her weapon with silk. No such luck.

“She’s following!” I shouted.

Rachel grunted a response, kicked Bentley to drive him to run faster, then whistled.

Her dogs broke away from the rest of the Ambassadors and Undersiders, trailing after us. Butcher had to teleport as one spry, smaller dog noticed her and ascended to the rooftop to give chase.

Buying time, but she was closing the distance.

I drew from the silk I had stored in my utility compartment. Coils of it, braided together into lines strong enough to suspend a grown man.

Hopefully strong enough to hold Butcher.

We had a plan, I just hadn’t counted on her being quite as tenacious as she was. I’d looked at the teleportation power, had failed to account for what it meant in conjunction with her danger sense.

I formed the silk into nets. I could guess at her next destination, track her possible arrival points.

Again, she teleported right on top of a net. The flames destroyed it.

One net left.

We’d reached the edge of the city. There were fewer buildings, fewer rooftops. Wet clumps of sand flew behind Bentley’s feet as he dug deep to find traction.

Butcher appeared on one of the last remaining rooftops, killing a cloud of bugs. Other ambient bugs clustered on her, biting and stinging, doing ineffectual damage. Too tough, courtesy of Butcher number… fuck it. Didn’t matter, really.

She deemed herself close enough to take a shot, drew her arrow back, raising the bow so it pointed nearly at the sky.

The net closed around her, unseated her arrow from its mount.

Bugs wound more strands around her knees. The wind pushed at her, and she tried to extend one foot to catch her balance, succeeded only in tipping herself over. She fell from the roof of the five-story building.

She teleported herself right to the ground, cutting the height of her fall in half and freeing herself of the net.

It was still a hard landing.

“Get her! Fetch her!”

Rachel nodded, whistled three times, pointed.

The dogs that trailed after us were quick to follow the order, snatching up Butcher.

She’d heal, was probably healing the brain damage Codex had inflicted. Butcher was tough enough that the dogs probably wouldn’t do enough damage before she regained her senses.

I might have been wrong in that assumption, but we couldn’t afford to think otherwise.

“Go!” I shouted.

We ran. Rachel and I on Bentley, a pack of her dogs following behind.

There was no telling how much time we had.

We’d gone into this with one plan. One solid way of putting an end to Butcher. It was why we weren’t hiding in the safety of Grue’s darkness.

Though we were in less danger than we’d been since the battle started, my heart was pounding harder than ever.

“Stop!” I called out, to be heard over the wind.

Rachel pulled Bentley to a stop. She knew what came next, gave a hand signal. “Dogs, stop! Rat-dog, forward!’

The dog that had Butcher ran on a little further, passing over a line of stones in the wet sand.

“Shake!”

Rat-dog shook Butcher like she was a chew toy.

“Good dog,” Rachel said. “Drop her.”

Rat-dog dropped Butcher.

“Come.”

Rat-dog whimpered.

“Good boy, come.”

Tail between his legs, Rat-dog approached, passing over the line of stones in the wet sand.

Long seconds passed. Bentley virtually heaved with the exertion of the run.

My eyes didn’t leave Butcher.

Butcher roused, and it wasn’t a slow affair. One instant she was lying prone, the next she’d teleported, appeared next to the narrow, light-bodied dog and bludgeoned it, sending it flying.

“Dakota, go! Bear, go!”

Two more dogs charged Butcher, drove her back.

“Stop,” I warned Rachel. I lowered my voice, “She has that rage aura.”

It didn’t matter. Butcher dispatched the two dogs just as easily, eyed us warily as Rachel commanded them to retreat.

“Good dogs,” Rachel said, as they hurried to her side.

My eyes still didn’t leave Butcher. I watched, waited.

She didn’t understand what was going on, why we weren’t pressing the attack.

But she wasn’t confident either.

She strung her bow, as if testing us. She started to create an arrow out of sand, condensing it into a more solid form.

Then she gave up, stepped back. The hardened rod of sand crumbled.

“Stop it,” she said.

I shook my head.

She lashed out, hit us with raw pain.

In the agony, the feeling of fire running through my veins, I toppled from Bentley’s back.

I’d anticipated this, or something like it, knew it was temporary. I could only grit my teeth and tell myself it was almost the best case scenario, even when it didn’t quite feel like it.

Rachel’s dogs bristled, but the pain dissipated, and she found herself free to command them to stand down.

It didn’t matter. Butcher was on her knees now, face turned toward the ground.

“Don’t say anything,” I murmured.

With more focus than before, Butcher formed a spike out of hard sand.

She was murmuring to herself now. Conversing under her breath with the voices in her head. She sounded oddly insistent, plaintive in a very childish manner.

When the weapon was formed, she glanced skyward, murmured something indistinct.

Then teleported a distance into the air, directly above the spike.

There was a wet sound, a pause.

“Nothing?” I asked Rachel. “You… don’t feel her powers?”

She shook her head.

“Then let’s go.”

We began our long journey back to the others, leaving Butcher with a spike through her heart.

No rush. The fight was over. One more foe taken down.

If the PRT happened to wonder if any of the Undersiders or Ambassadors had acquired Butcher’s powers, all the better.

“Mind if I come by tonight?” I asked, my voice low.

Rachel shot me a glower over her shoulder, “Why?”

“To talk.”

“We can talk now.”

“And so I can see how you’re coping with your minions.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a whatever,” she said. “Do whatever you want.”

“Okay,” I said.

There was no more conversation as we closed the distance to the others.

They were more or less in ship-shape when we arrived. Regent was propped up against a wall, but he wasn’t pulverized. The only one we’d lost was Codex.

“Success?” Grue asked.

“Success,” I said.

The entire group, even the straight-backed Ambassadors, seemed to react with relief.

“Guess my sister has one more kill under her belt,” Regent commented. “Fourteen voices in Cherish’s head to keep her company as she spends the next few centuries alone at the bottom of the bay.”

■

“Daddy!” a toddler squealed. No older than three, the small child waded past a pack of dogs to her father, the tall, large-bellied man who I’d seen handling some of Rachel’s dogs.

Rachel ignored the reunion, greeted the dogs who milled around her, barking and whining in joy as their master returned.

“Food?” she asked me, almost as if it were an afterthought.

“Sure.”

“Someone make food,” she declared.

“I will!” a darker-skinned teenage girl declared. She looked to be of mixed race, with brilliant blue eyes that didn’t match up with her brown, coarse hair and skin.

“Hamburger,” Rachel said.

“Okay,” the kid said. “Anything else?”

“No.”

“Vegetables,” I cut in. “Something healthier.”

Rachel shrugged. “That grilled crap you made before, with the… long green vegetables.”

“The asparagus?”

“Yeah. That was good.”

The kid looked like she’d just won the lottery, almost bursting with joy.

Barker, Biter and the veterinarian all set to basic chores around the place, as if it were routine. No one seemed to begrudge the fact that Bitch was taking it easy while they worked, not even Barker, who had been somewhat prickly the last time I’d run across him.

Either she’d earned their respect, or they’d learned how stubborn she was.

“I wanted to talk to you about the future,” I said.

“Mm,” Rachel said, reclining. The dogs were clustered around her feet, the larger ones laying their heads in her lap.

“It’s… problematic, having you patrolling the area out here, scaring the locals. You know that, right?”

Rachel shrugged, apparently unconcerned.

I watched as the man with the three year old girl joined one of Bitch’s other followers, a woman who had apparently been babysitting the child. He fished in one pocket for money, then handed it over.

His voice was quiet, a mumble, “When some’dy helps you out, what d’you say?”

“Thank you!” the toddler chirped.

The woman only scowled. I saw Rachel out of the corner of one eye, watching.

The man made his way past the kitchen, nearly running into the darker-skinned girl who was already cooking, past Barker and Biter, before finding a place to sit with his child.

Despite his size, his presence, the man with the child didn’t make eye contact with anyone. Almost flinched at it, even in the face of a hundred-pound girl.

Mentally disabled? Developmentally delayed? Or had he suffered a trauma?

Between the way the girl had been so overjoyed at the slightest praise, and this man’s attitude, I was wondering if maybe Rachel’s people were somehow just as damaged as she was.

“There’s one possibility,” I said to Rachel. “A role you could play in this. You don’t have to. Just putting it out there.”

“What’s that?”

“The portal, it sounds like it’s going to be a thing. There’s a whole world out there with nobody around. People will be settling there, establishing a society. I’m imagining there’ll be something of a society popping up around the portal, a mirror city to Brockton Bay. But there’ll be pioneers as well. People striking out on their own. And some of the Undersider’s enemies are going to try to slip through, control things on the other side.”

“And?”

“If you’re willing, maybe you could serve as an aide to the Undersiders, but you patrol for trouble, track down troublemakers and fugitives. That could be your territory, more than just the fringes of this city.”

She frowned.

“It’s just an idea.”

“It’d be hard to feed my dogs.”

“Manageable,” I said. “Tattletale aims to control one of the fleets that brings supplies to the other side. We don’t know how restrictive the government will be with the portal, or where ownership will lie, but… I don’t imagine getting dog food to you will be a problem. And as the area gets settled, maybe you could supply trained dogs to pioneers or hunters looking to capitalize on the area.”

She didn’t reply, focusing on her adoring dogs, instead. Two hands, no less than twenty ears to scratch in her reach.

“Think about it,” I said.

“Mm,” she grunted.

The man was playing with his daughter, who was squealing and reaching out to pet the dogs who were standing by, almost protective.

“They’re okay?” I asked. “The dogs won’t hurt the kid?”

“None of the dogs at this shelter,” Rachel said. “Picked them carefully.”

I was a little stunned at that. To give that much thought to something like that… it wasn’t in her character.

“Why?” I asked.

“You said I should think about what people need from dogs. If I’m going to find them homes, the dogs need to be able to live with families.”

I nodded. There were more questions I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to spoil the quiet relief I felt at hearing her say that.

We sat for ten more minutes before Bitch rose and began playing with dogs. She incorporated training into the play, dividing dogs into teams and having them fetch in shifts, among other things. I stood, joining her, and she handed me a ball.

There wasn’t much more conversation beyond that. Most of the talking was reserved for the dogs.

Time passed quickly enough that I was surprised that Rachel’s henchperson announced that the food was ready. Not everyone collected some. Barker and Biter held off. The vet had her hands full. Rachel loaded up a plate with two burgers and a pile of grilled vegetables. I took about half the portions she did.

It wasn’t very good, but the kid seemed so pleased with herself that I couldn’t say anything to that effect. Rachel didn’t seem to care, nor did the big man and his daughter.

“Thank you,” the toddler piped up, sing-song, when she was done eating the bits of crumbled up hamburger and bun.

Rachel, for her part, only stood to grab a soda. She mussed up the cook’s hair on the way back, as if she were petting a dog.

…Not quite a leadership style I might have suggested, but the kid looked happy.

I finished what I could, considered throwing the rest to the dogs, then decided it was best not to risk angering Rachel.

It was late at night, now, but I didn’t return to my lair. We tended to the dogs, grooming them, cleaning their ears and brushing their teeth. Certain dogs were due pills, and Rachel saw to it that they got the pills.

It was an endless sequence of those little tasks I’d always found frustrating. Cleaning up, doing jobs that would only be undone by the next day, if not within minutes. I’d always found them frustrating, found it tolerable only now that I could delegate bugs to many of them.

Rachel reveled in it. It seemed to calm her, center her.

The others found their way to their beds, or made their way out the front door to head back to wherever they lived. Many dogs retreated to the kennels that were set out for each of them, and Rachel took the time to lock them in.

The night was creeping on, and I wasn’t leaving. I knew why, didn’t want to admit it to myself.

Exhaustion overtook me eventually, though I would have been hard pressed to say exactly when.

I woke in the middle of the evening, found myself slumped on a couch with a crick in my neck, a blanket over me.

Rachel was on another couch, and the blue-eyed girl, the cook, was lying beside her, her back pressed to Rachel’s front.

I stood, stretched, winced at the knot at the muscle where my neck met my shoulder. The movement seemed to stir Rachel. She started to extricate herself from behind the girl.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” I murmured, keeping my voice quiet enough that it wouldn’t disturb anyone.

She shifted position, keeping herself propped up, “You leaving?”

I frowned, “Yeah.”

“Okay.” She settled back down, and the kid curled up against her. Kid. The teenager was probably older than Aisha or Vista. I couldn’t help but see her as younger, because there was something about her that screamed ‘lost’.

Maybe that was the role that Rachel filled, here. Forming a screwed up, antisocial family with those who had nobody else. Damaged people.

I was okay with that. I could believe that, even if she didn’t heal them or help them get better in any explicit way, she wouldn’t make them worse.

I felt like I should say something more, but I was tired, my thoughts increasingly occupied by greater matters. “Bye.”

“Bye,” she said.

I headed to the door. I was already gathering bugs to me, just to ensure I had a safe walk back. A walk home in the dark would be nice. Time to think.

“Thanks.”

I stopped in my tracks, looked back.

Rachel had her head down against the armrest of the couch. I couldn’t see her through the other girl’s head.

But it had been her voice.

I revised my opinion. Maybe they could heal each other, in their own ways.

It helped, as I stepped outside and started my long, quiet trek home. I was riddled with doubts, with countless worries, but knowing that Rachel was in a better place was a light in the darkness.

I had let two days pass since my conversation with Miss Militia. Dealt with the Teeth. They weren’t all gone. Hemorrhagia had slipped away, as had Reaver, and there were rank and file troops. Parian still had some cleaning up to do, at the very least, but the Teeth weren’t the presence they had been.

Now I had to face everything I’d been dreading. I’d spent time here because I was procrastinating. Putting off the inevitable. I couldn’t put it off any longer: if I didn’t bring myself to do it soon, it would only get harder to bring myself to do it.

Tomorrow morning, I thought. I face off with Tagg and the rest of the PRT.

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